


in a sense we’re all winning (we’re alive)

by siriuspiggyback



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Allison Hargreeves-centric, BAMF Allison, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, No Incest, Protective Allison Hargreeves, Sibling Love, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 09:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24847501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siriuspiggyback/pseuds/siriuspiggyback
Summary: She is choking on her own blood in her brother's arms, and for a moment, Allison thinks to herself, in perfect clarity: Oh. I’m dying.The pain becomes distant, and everything goes black.Then she wakes up.Again.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves/Patrick, Claire & Allison Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Allison Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves/Leonard Peabody
Comments: 341
Kudos: 610





	1. in times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love

**Author's Note:**

> the title and chapter titles are from poems by frank o'hara

She’s choking.

Blood fills Allison’s throat, hot and coppery, blocking her airways, and she’s choking on it, she can’t _breathe,_ and Vanya- where did she go? Allison tries to look around her, but black spots are crowding her vision. The room is full of her shallow, wet gasps, and then the sound of the door opening, and footsteps, and words, but she can’t understand what they’re saying because her throat-

For a moment, she thinks to herself, in perfect clarity: _Oh. I’m dying._

Luther is holding her, she thinks, she can hear his sobbing, saying her name, and she wants to tell him that she’s sorry, but she can’t. 

Her eyes latch onto a face. Klaus. He’s crying, too, but silently, hands pressed up against his cheeks tightly, and his eyes look too big on his face. He shakes his head. Utters one, almost silent word: _No._

More noise. The sensation of being scooped up in her brother's arms, warm and safe, and the pain is going dull and distant.

Then darkness.

Birds chattering.

Light flashing against her fluttering eyelids. It’s grey, not a hint of the sharp red that should be everywhere. Nothing hurts.

A flash of white.

She wakes up.

“ _Shit!”_ Allison yelps, pressing down on the brake, her car skidding slightly on the road. She’s lucky; the road is deserted, except for her, and nobody sees her come to a sudden, jerking halt.

Her heart thumps unevenly in her chest, and she sucks in a breath, hand pressing against her throat. She thought- 

What was happening?

Shakily, Allison pulls the car off onto the side of the road.

Did she fall asleep at the wheel? She has been driving a while now, and she is exhausted, but she doesn’t remember falling asleep. She must have, though, because she remembers dreaming. A nightmare. Vanya and yelling and blood, too much blood. She shivers in her carseat. It seems like too long a dream for a moment of dozing, but dreams can be funny like that.

Allison tilts her head forward until it knocks against the steering wheel. She feels like an idiot. If there had been another car on the road, she could’ve gotten someone killed. At least she feels awake now, the adrenaline making her blood crash in her veins, the urge to move, to run, making her twitch. She wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon.

She switches the radio to something more upbeat, and starts driving again. This time, she takes it slower, stays carefully under the speed limit, even though it’s approaching dawn and the roads are still empty. At the nearest 24-hour diner, she buys herself a coffee. It slows her down, she reasons, but she can’t help Vanya if she crashes on her way there. 

Eventually, she hits traffic.

The delay makes her stomach twist anxiously. The longer she waits, the more Vanya is in danger, and if something happens to her because Allison was too slow, she’ll never forgive herself.

The line of traffic leads up past a crime scene. The police tape is whipping about in the wind, but the place seemed abandoned, no officers around. Something about that seemed… wrong. She shakes herself. It is just nerves, she firmly tells herself, and boredom. No need for dramatics. Crime scenes always look a little creepy, but it doesn’t mean anything. Allison averts her eyes, focusing on the road ahead.

When Allison eventually pulls up outside the house, her gut twists with deja vu. The house looks so similar to the one in her dream. It was dark then, but the porch is the same, the windchimes swaying gently, the same exposed wood paneling. Her heart squeezes. It’s too identical, disconcertingly so, as if she’s been here before, and panic makes her throat hurt. How did she-

Wait.

She laughs to herself, embarrassed. Of course she knew what the property looks like; there was a photo in the police file, wasn’t there? God, she had gotten all worked up over nothing, freaking herself out. Just because the cabin looks like a horror movie scenario, that doesn’t mean that this is a horror movie. It’s just a house. Malicious as it looks, it’s just a house, and Allison is a grown ass adult. She knows mixed martial arts, and she has a mean right hook. There’s no reason to be afraid. (Except the Leonard is a murderer, and he has Vanya, and Vanya could be hurt, could be-)

Centering herself, she walks up the porch. If she listens carefully, Allison can just about make out sound from inside. Hopefully it’s Vanya. Instead of sneaking in through a back window like her instincts tell her, she raises a hand to knock on the door.

Only for the door to swing open before she makes contact.

Vanya pulls short, a laugh dying on her face as she catches sight of Allison. Behind her, Leonard - _Harold -_ puts a hand on her shoulder, and she has to hold back the urge to tear it away from her sister. One of his eyes is covered with a patch.

“Hi,” says Allison, pasting a smile on.

Cautiously, Vanya says, “Allison. Hi. What are you doing here?”

She licks her lips. She can’t tell Vanya everything, not with Harold right behind her like a vulture waiting to swoop in. “I need to talk to you,” she tells her sister.

Vanya narrows her eyes. “What about?”

Allison hesitates. “I need to talk to you in private,” she clarifies.

This seems to be the wrong thing to say, because Vanya stubbornly says, “Anything you want to say, you can say in front of Leonard.”

“Of course,” Harold says with a slimy smile.

Shifting her weight, Allison weighs her options. She doesn’t want to escalate the situation, doesn’t want to provoke Harold, but she can’t just let Vanya go either. In the end, she says, “Vanya, it’s important. Can you come back with me? I can explain everything in the car, I promise, just- please.”

“Tell me now, and then I’ll decide if I want to go with you,” Vanya says, jaw set.

“You can’t stay here,” says Allison, voice tight, “it isn’t safe.”

“Safe?” parrots Vanya. Her eyebrows rise with disbelief. “First off it’s not safe for me to stay at the house, then it isn’t safe for me to stay somewhere else? What do you _want,_ Allison?”

Allison feels desperation rising up in her chest. She’s losing control of the situation, and Vanya isn’t listening, and she doesn’t know what to do without using her powers, but she promised herself she wouldn’t do that. “Vanya, please,” she says weakly.

“I want you to leave,” Vanya says, pushing past her. 

“Where are you going?”

“It’s none of your business!” retorts Vanya as she stomps away towards the treeline. Harold shoots Allison a smug look as he follows behind.

Frustration bubbling up as she chases her sister, Allison cries, “So what, you’re going off into the woods with a guy you just met? Real smart!”

Vanya doesn’t stop walking, just throws back, “At least Leonard cares about me!”

“And I don't?” challenges Allison, wobbling slightly as her heels sink into the mud.

Finally, Vanya whirls around, and snarls, “You _never_ cared about me.”

The rage on her sister's face makes Allison take a step back. She’s never seen Vanya so emotional, and despite her tiny frame, something instinctive tells Allison that she should be afraid. The dream niggles at the back of her brain like a warning. “Vanya, you’re my sister,” Allison says around the rising panic.

“We were never family! Stop pretending,” Vanya barks out, hands fisted tightly at her sides. As if sensing her anger, the wind stirs, dead leaves whipping across the forest floor.

Raising her voice to be heard above the sound, Allison says, “I’m not pretending. Vanya, I love you!”

“ _Stop!_ Just, stop it! I’m finally, _finally_ happy, and you’re ruining it!”

The anguish in her voice makes goosebumps rise on Allison’s skin. “It’s not like that,” she begs her to understand. “Leonard- He isn’t who you think he is.”

“He loves me,” Vanya refutes. 

Harold is standing right behind her, and the greedy, joyful look in his remaining eye makes Allison want to claw it out. She takes a step forward, not sure if she wants to go to her sister or get Harold away from her, but the wind, which has been building stronger with each second, pushes hard enough that she falls back a few steps, air knocked from her lungs. “What’s happening?”

Vanya looks at her coldly, her hair flying madly in the air, like the tendrils are alive. “It’s me,” she says, tone somewhere between proud and uncertain. “It’s my powers.”

“Powers?” Allison echoes numbly.

“Turns out I’ve had them the entire time,” Vanya says.

Allison tries to push the two concepts together in her mind, but they repel each other. _Powers_ and _Vanya_ just don’t go together. Right?

Right?

She squeezes her eyes tight. It’s as if understanding is so close, but as far as she stretches, her fingertips just brush against it uselessly. This all seems so familiar. She’s been here before, but she hasn’t. Vanya and powers. Powers and Vanya.

Five words:

_You did this to me?_

Oh, God.

“I understand now,” Allison breathes out.

Vanya looks at her, eyes wide and dark and uncomprehending. “What?”

“Dad, he- We were four years old, and I didn’t understand… He told me to rumour you. To make you think that you were _just ordinary,”_ Allison chokes out. “He made me an accomplice.” 

For a long moment, there is true silence. The wind abruptly stops dead, the leaves falling to scatter across the ground, and it seems as though the forest stops breathing. Everything, waiting. Vanya looks at Allison, expression unreadable. Then, she says those words that Allison knew she would say. “You did this to me?”

Allison has no answer. She never did.

“You knew? This whole time?”

“No, no! I didn't really understand until I came today, until I saw it,” Allison denies, fighting to keep her face from crumpling with tears.

A vicious sort of smile takes up residence on Vanya's face. “Well, now it all makes sense. This is why you never wanted me around!” Allison shakes her head, but Vanya continues on, “You couldn't risk me threatening your place in the house, your- your _dominance.”_

Allison thinks: _Oh, God, no. Not again. Not again._

“Please, Vanya, don’t do this,” she tries, taking a shaky step forward. “Please, please just listen-”

“No! I’m _so tired_ of listening, I’m _done_ listening. You destroyed my entire life! You-”

It’s all falling apart. Allison is holding water in her hands, and no matter how hard she holds, it continues to run down her wrists. Her words will fail, just like they did last time, because there’s nothing she can say that can undo what she’s done, but she has to try, doesn’t she? Doesn’t she? 

“Vanya,” she says, taking another step closer, hands reaching out, because maybe her words aren’t enough, but she has to do something-

 _“Don’t touch me!”_ shrieks Vanya, and then something hits Allison’s chest, something huge and powerful, like a percussive blast, and she is flung backward through the air.

She doesn’t have the time to feel afraid before her body hits the tree.

This time, it is quick, at least.

Light across her eyelids. The smell of grass.

She wakes up.

A scream in her throat, she hits the brake reflexively, and the car skids across the empty road, coming to a jerky stop. She gasps a shuddering breath, pressing her hand to her chest, which seems uninjured, despite the memory of her ribs breaking under force.

She doesn’t know what’s happening, but Allison is certain of one thing:

That wasn’t a dream.


	2. it is the law of my own voice i shall investigate

Allison is a movie star. Hollywood is kind of her area of expertise, and as a teen, she had spent many hours furtively sneaking out to the cinema, or, when she was feeling particularly daring, bringing a tape home with her. In the academy, you needed something to focus on to keep you sane. For Vanya, it was her violin; for Klaus, his drugs; and for Allison, it was movies.

So, suffice to say, she's seen this one before.

Groundhog Day was a familiar favourite, but she's seen other, more recent iterations too. She knows what a time loop is. She hadn't been expecting to _live_ one, but hey, her life has always been an anomaly. Why not this too? Another genre to add to the list, right between horror and sci-fi. (Once, Allison had thought that rom-com could be applicable. Turns out it was just setting her backstory up for the next horror.)

She's a practical kind of person. That's what she tells herself as she puts the car into gear, pulling forward. She's practical, and she's going to fix this. Her story just needs an expert. 

At the closest gas station, she finds a payphone, and dials by heart.

It’s the early hours of the morning, still before dawn, so she isn’t expecting a quick answer, but it only rings a couple of times before someone picks up with a breathless, “Hello?”

“Klaus?” she guesses.

“Allison! Hey!” Klaus says, voice over-vibrant in that way of his. “What can I do you for?”

She smiles slightly, despite herself. “Can I speak to Five? I know he’s injured, but it’s important.”

Klaus hums. “Let me go wake him up. If I don’t come back to the phone, he probably stabbed me,” he says.

“Be ready to duck,” Allison advises him, only half joking.

A long stretch of silence, and then a distant squawk. She winces. 

_“What?”_

“Hello to you, too,” Allison says dryly.

“Excuse me for skipping the pleasantries,” Five snippily replies, “but I’m busy trying to recover from a shrapnel wound. What do you want?”

Allison sighs. Better get right to the point. “Five, what do you know about time loops?”

“Is this a theoretical question?”

“This is a help-I’m-stuck-in-a-time-loop question.”

“... Allison, if this is a joke-”

“It’s not a joke,” she snaps.

Five continues, “Seriously, I do not have time for games.”

“Five,” hisses Allison, “this _isn’t a fucking joke,_ okay?”

A considering pause. The sharpness seems to convince Five to at least humour her, because he replies, “How many times have you looped?”

“This is day three,” Allison says.

“Day three. Right. And what happens at the end?”

She swallows. This isn’t the time for panic, it’s the time for practicality, so she pushes it all down, and says, “I die.”

A small intake of breath is audible over the phone line. By Five’s standards, it’s outright emotional. “How?”

Allison hesitates.

“How, Allison?”

“Vanya,” she blurts. “Vanya kills me.”

“Wha- Don’t be ridiculous,” Five blusters.

“I’m telling you the truth. Vanya-”

“Vanya wouldn’t do that!”

“She has powers!”

At this, Five goes quiet. Allison hopes that it’s enough to make Five think, rather than hotly deny Vanya’s involvement, but she knows they were always close. It seems Five’s logical, curious mind wins out, because he says, “What kind of powers?”

Allison tries to sort through her memories, but when she tries to think too hard about her deaths, her mind skirts away from it reflexively, like a defensive mechanism. She focuses on right before her deaths, when the air became alive and electric, and the wind ripped through the room. “Some kind of telekinesis, maybe? Whatever it is, she’s powerful, and she doesn’t know how to control it.”

“Shit,” Five breathes. _“Shit.”_

“It’s Leonard - Harold - he’s manipulating her. I just don’t know what to do, everything I say makes it worse, and then I die again and- I just don’t understand what’s happening,” says Allison, pushing some loose curls away from her face. “Is it Vanya, do you think? Could she be causing the loop, like a secondary power or something?”

“I don’t know,” says Five, although he sounds pained to admit it. “Listen, Allison, this isn’t something you can deal with alone. Come back to the academy-”

“What? No, I can’t, Vanya-”

“Can take care of herself, apparently. We need to make a plan, and we need the full force of the academy,” Five reasons. “You won't be any help if you’re dead.”

The operator informs her that she’s running out of minutes, and she scrambles to push the last of her spare change into the slot. 

“Allison?”

“I’m here,” she says softly.

Five challenges, “Are you coming back?”

She resists the urge to lean her head against the grimy glass of the phonebooth. How long since she last slept? Do the hours repeated count? If so, it’s been days, now. No wonder she feels so exhausted. “She’s my sister,” Allison says.

“She’s my sister, too,” Five fiercely reminds her.

“Then you should know that we can’t just abandon her,” she argues.

Five says, ornery as ever, “We have to be smart about this. There’s more at stake here than you and Vanya, okay? The whole world is set to die.”

“I know that,” Alllison says, “but she’s _our sister.”_

“And you’re my sister, too! Am I supposed to let you die?”

Allison blinks in surprise. “That’s- weirdly sentimental.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Five snaps. “Besides, you having time travelled could be useful. For once, we’re one step ahead of my former employer. We should press the advantage.”

“That’s more like it,” she sighs. 

“Just get here, will you? And I’ll gather up the rest of the idiots,” he says tiredly. 

She considers it. Despite her insistence, Allison isn’t particularly eager to die again. Besides, if it doesn’t work out, she can just try it again tomorrow. She concedes, “Alright, I’ll be there.”

“Okay, good. If things don’t work out… tell me that you know I stole Diego’s batman comic.”

“Wha… You stole that? Luther almost got stabbed over that thing!”

“Irrelevant,” Five says. “It’s just so you don't have to make me trust you each time. No one else knows about it.”

And Allison knows that this is a Serious Situation, but she’s also a sister, so she has to press, “I didn’t realise you were such an avid comic book fan.”

“God, I hate you,” he says. 

Allison laughs. 

“Just get here.”

“Okay, see you soon.”

She expects him to hang up, and the phone is already an inch from her ear, before he spits out, fast, as if any sentiment at all is agonising, “Try not to die on the way here.”

The dial tone rings out.

She feels… kind of touched.

The night is cold, and her leather jacket is cute, but not exactly built for nighttime excursions, so Allison hurries to turn on the heat when she gets back in the car. She rubs her hands together, shivering. She’ll warm up soon, she just needs to start driving.

Turning the car around is hard. Allison had agreed to go back home, but the actual act of turning around is too much like turning her back on Vanya. She has to remind herself why she was doing it. Five was right, and she knew that the logical answer was to go to him, the person with the most experience with time travel. She’s seen the movies, but she’s no theoretical physicist. 

In the end, she takes a long breath, and roughly pulls out, hands tight on the steering wheel. It's a tactical retreat, she tells herself. Losing the battle to win the war. She can't save Vanya if the day is going to be overwritten, so it's smarter to address one problem at a time. First she fixes the time loop issue, then she can fix the Vanya's-Boyfriend-Is-A-Murdering-Creep problem, and then after that, the apocalypse problem. Simple.

She drives more carefully than usual, Five's parting words echoing in her mind. She doesn't want to find out what a high speed collision feels like. Allison switches the radio to something slow, and tries to keep below the speed limit, meticulously checking and double checking the road. It's too early for the morning rush, almost entirely silent, except for the occasional long distance trucker driving through the night, and she gives all of them a wide berth.

She's nearly at the academy when she runs into a problem.

There is a car in the middle of the road, the hood popped open. Smoke lazily drifts out. Allison catches a distinctive, sweet smell, like mom cooking fresh pancakes for breakfast; probably the coolant, she thinks. Standing a few feet away from the car is a frazzled looking blonde lady. She looks at Allison’s car with an embarrassed smile, smoothing her fly aways down, before tottering towards her on heels which are clearly too high for her. Allison is suspicious, but the lady looks harmless enough, and the way her mascara is smudged sets off a protective instinct. It’s nighttime, and she doesn’t look capable of defending herself, considering she can’t even walk in those two inch heels, so Allison can’t just leave her to fend for herself out here with a busted car, can she?

Allison rolls down her window a smidge, and the woman leans down to speak to her. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened, but there was a bang, and now my car’s smoking and I don’t know what to do,” she blurts out frantically.

“It’s okay, these things happen,” assures Allison. “Have you called for a tow truck?” 

The woman shakes her head. “I don’t know where the nearest phone is, and I didn’t want to walk around by myself,” she admits.

Everything about this seems like a trap. Yet, Allison can’t bring herself to drive away. Maybe she’s soft, but her instincts say that the woman is genuine, and Allison’s instincts are usually pretty damn good. She bites her lip. Five would kill her, but she can’t just abandon this stranger. “Okay,” she says, pushing open the car door. The air is cold against her skin, and she shivers. “Let me take a look.”

“Oh, do you know cars?” the lady asks excitedly.

Allison shrugs. “Not a lot, but I know the basics. I can take a look, and if it’s bad, I’ll help you find a phone, okay?”

“You’re an angel,” she replies, relief evident on her face. “I’m Maggie, by the way.”

“Allison.” She strides over to the car, not too fast, conscious of Maggie’s too high heels. Allison shoots a furtive look at Maggie. “So what brings you out so late?”

The woman wobbles slightly, but remains composure. “I was at a party. I’m not drunk!” The abruptness of the statement draws a look from Allison. “Okay, I did have a couple drinks,” she folds. “I think I’m under the limit, but I really hope no one checks, y’know?”

Suppressing a roll of her eyes, Allison says, “Sure.”

The hood is already popped, but it’s difficult to see through the coolant steaming out, particularly in the hazy light from the street lamp. A torch would be useful. She ducks to check if a fan belt is dragging underneath, but can’t see anything strange. Looking at where the steam is coming from, yeah, she’s pretty sure that’s the coolant. “It could be the hose clamp is loose, but it seems like a lot of steam for that,” Allison tells her regretfully. “I can’t really see well enough to check.”

“Shoot,” says Maggie. “Should we call someone then?”

“Yeah,” Allison says vaguely. She is distracted by a glint of light, not in the engine, but the metal of the hood. She reaches out to touch it. A perfectly round hole, about an inch in diameter. The edge is puckered and sharp, bending down. An entry wound, her mind distantly supplies. A gunshot hole.

She looks to Maggie in horror. Maggie looks back with blank confusion, which turns to fear at Allison’s expression. Allison opens her mouth to say- something. Anything. To get down, to get back, to run-

**_Bang._ **

Heat blooms through Allisons chest. That’s what registers first. Not pain, not the break of ribs or the tear or skin. Just the hot spread of blood.

Maggie screams.

Allison tries to take a breath - she wants to comfort Maggie, to tell her that it’s okay, but she can’t - and ends up coughing and spluttering. Her lungs are full of fluid. She’s drowning. Maggie clings to her, and when Allison looks up at her (when did she fall to the floor?), illuminated by the hazy streetlight, she looks like something out of a renaissance painting. Specifically, Caravaggio’s rendering of Medusa, expression stretched and distorted by absolute terror, eye wide and unseeing. She’s screaming for help. Allison hopes no one comes; murderers don’t like to leave witnesses. 

She tries to tell her to run, to save herself, but before the words reach her mouth, everything fades away.


	3. with your eyes shut, unsmiling,  your volcanic flesh hides

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: vomiting

She blinks against grey light. 

It's bright like the sun, but she can't feel any warmth on her skin. She can't feel anything at all.

Then-

" _Fuck!"_ Allison screams, slamming down the emergency brake, and the screech of her tires is already becoming familiar, and how many times is she going to die? How many times? How many-

She smacks the steering wheel. The horn beeps, but it isn't as satisfying as she was hoping for.

The car is still in the middle of the road, but she knows that no one else will be driving through here for a while, so she shoves her way out of the car door and stumbles to the side of the road just in time to gag.

As she dry heaves into the scraggly grass, some bitter part of her thinks: The Glamourous Allison Hargreaves, everyone. 

She spits, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, absently hoping she didn't have any lipstick on. Water would be useful. Instead, she settles for some half forgotten gum in her glovebox. Glancing in the mirror, she fixes the smudges of mascara before executing a wide u-turn.

Driving through the night, she plans.

Five still seems her best bet. It's the getting to him that's the problem. She has clearly underestimated the reach of his mysterious employer, but now she knows that any deviation from the timeline will be met with extreme prejudice. So Allison needs to be sneaky about it.

But how did they know?

Shooting out a car engine shows an amount of premeditation that worries her. Someone knew she was coming. How were they already a step ahead of her, when by all rights, she should know more than anyone about how the day will play out than anyone. Are they tracking her car? Are they watching her? Watching the house? 

She pulls up at a different gas station than yesterday, and picks up the pay phone.

Klaus answers the phone with the same cheery, "Hello?"

"Hi, Klaus," Allison says. "Could you grab Five for me?"

“Let me go wake him up. If I don’t come back to the phone, he probably stabbed me,” he says, just like last time.

"Run as soon as you do it," she advises.

Klaus jokes, "Yes, ma'am."

Again, a long pause, and then a yelp. Some things never change.

Five picks up the phone with his irritable, "What?"

Allison goes straight in with, "When we were ten, you stole Diego's batman comic."

"Wha- How do you know that?" Five asks, voice tight with suspicion. "No one knows about that."

"Exactly. Meet me at the place that Ben broke his toe in an hour."

A beat. "Allison, what's this about?"

She glances out into the dark surrounding the phone booth. "I'll explain when I see you. And Five? Be sneaky about it."

"Shit," he curses, seemingly understanding what Allison has left unsaid: _We are being watched._

Allison hangs up, nodding to herself. This time, she's the one a step ahead.

Driving back towards the city, she takes a wide, meandering route, driving back on herself a few times, just in case she's being tailed. Then, when she's still a couple miles from her destination, she parks and hails down a taxi. Better to be safe than sorry.

By the time she enters the bowling alley, Five is already waiting inside. His posture radiates impatience, like maybe he’s been waiting for a while - although, with Five, impatience is an almost constant, so maybe he’s just arrived. 

"Allison," he grits out.

"Five," she replies, glancing around the bowling alley. Some of the staff are watching, but whether they're curious or something worse, she can't tell. "Let's take a walk."

"What- No, not until you tell me what's going on."

Allison narrows her eyes. "I'll tell you when I'm sure we're not being listened in on," she says firmly, marching back out the door and hoping he follows.

Fortunately, Five has never been one to leave something alone.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“Can you jump the both of us?”

Indignant, Five says, “Of course," despite them both knowing that it was draining for him. Allison doesn't like the idea that he might deplete his power and end up defenceless if attacked. Or- as defenceless as a ruthless killer could be. Still, it seems to be worth the risk, if they can find somewhere they could speak openly. She can't rule out the idea that she has been followed.

"Surprise me," Allison says with false cheer.

Five takes her arm, and she is wrenched through the material of space-time.

She finds herself on a rooftop. The street is unfamiliar, although that might be due to the strange, aerial angle. ”Where are we?”

“Library roof,” Five says shortly. “Now start talking.”

Allison huffs out a breath, dropping down to sit on the cold gravel. Yesterday - or, several yesterdays ago - she might have worried about ruining her pants. Now, it doesn’t even cross her mind. “You stole Diego’s batman comic.”

Five folds his arms. “Yes, you already mentioned. How do you even-?”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“What? I think I would remember that.”

She smiles sadly, tiredly. “Because it got overwritten.”

“You time travelled?” Five says, almost accusational. “What the fuck is going on? First Klaus, now you?”

“Klaus time travelled?” Allison blurts in surprise.

“Irrelevant,” Five says, because he’s the kind of person who can string together their brother’s name and _time travel_ and come to the conclusion that it isn’t vital information. “How did you do it? Did you touch the briefcase?”

“Briefcase? No,” says Allison, “I didn’t _do_ anything. Well- I suppose, technically, yeah, I did-” Five rolls his eyes and goes to interrupt, so she spits out, “I died.”

This, finally, seems to stump Five. “You what?”

“I died. I keep dying, and then I start this day again. The batman comic - you told me that so you would know it’s true.”

She watches Five as he thinks about it for precisely two seconds before saying, "Okay."

"Okay?" Allison repeats dubiously.

"It's the most logical explanation," Five says with a shrug. 

Maybe Allison shouldn't be surprised at his easy acceptance; she wonders whether he had already chosen the Batman comic fact as a sort of passcode for this very purpose. It does seem like one of the strange, unlikely things he would think of. "Well, alright then."

"So what have we already tried?" Five asks, slipping into logistics mode.

"This is the first time I've actually made it to you. Last time I got shot on my way, presumably by your former employer. You warned me that they wouldn't like me _deviating from the timeline_ or whatever, and I definitely did that," she says. 

"Bastards," Five says emphatically.

Allison pressed her lips together. "Yeah," she says. "So I was wondering… their base, or whatever, how does that work?"

"What do you mean?" 

"Well, if they deal with the whole timeline, are they part of that timeline, or are they separate, somehow?"

She receives an appraising look. "Both, technically," he eventually explains. "It exists within a single instance of time, and has a separate internal timeline that works parallel to any changes made in our timeline."

"So…" Allison wonders, "if someone destroyed the base, and then in our timeline, the day reset… they would still be destroyed?"

With a shark smile, Five replies, "Precisely."

First things first, Five makes a stop at the house, before returning with a briefcase in hand. "This is how we get there."

"A briefcase?" Allison says blankly.

"It's commission technology. Trust me."

The whole thing is weird and confusing, but she finds that she does trust her brother, no matter how long it's been. "Okay, let's do this."

He fiddles with the dial for a moment, before straightening, and flipping the clasps.

Blinding blue light. Allison feels herself lurch, like a hook in her navel, wrenching her backwards-

And then she's somewhere else.

For a shady, murderous organisation, the base is oddly pleasant. The grass around the building is green and lush, and the base itself is well kept. They are a way off from it, at the edge of a copse of trees, but luckily there's no one else around, so their arrival goes unnoticed. Five is squinting at the building like he might spontaneously develop a second power and explode it with his mind. He’s not Vanya, though, so the building sits there, unaffected. 

He nods to himself, and passes the briefcase off onto his sister, before saying, “I’ll start on the top floor, where it’s quietest, and work my way down.”

“Don’t you mean _we?_ ” Allison challenges.

“No,” Five says dismissively.

Allison folds her arms. “We are not splitting up.”

“It’s the most logical course of action,” Five argues. “I can search the place faster alone.”

Although, yes, it is logical, it doesn’t sit right with Allison. Tactically, splitting up is rarely a smart move. Still, if something does go wrong, she supposes, they can try again tomorrow. “Fine. Just- Be safe.”

Five rolls his eyes, and then he’s gone in a flash of blue light.

Waiting has never been one of Allison’s strong suits. She’s always better suited to _doing,_ practical and proactive as she is. The waiting around only makes her feel antsy, makes her more likely to get stupid and act before thinking, but she knows that this is too important to be reckless with. Instead, she chews her nails - a habit she hasn’t fallen into since her teens - and tries not to twitch at every faint sound. 

When Five reappears, she almost brains him with the briefcase before she recognises him. “Sorry,” Allison mutters, taking him in. There’s a spot of blood on his collar. “Find it okay?”

“Yes,” says Five. “And I took care of the occupant.”

“Okay, good,” Allison says halfheartedly. 

Appraising her, Five asks, “You’re sure about this? I can do it myself if you’re going to-”

“I can do it,” she interrupts, half spitting the words out, bitter as they taste.

“Okay,” Five says, before grabbing her by the arm and pulling her through space.

The office Allison finds herself in is… quaint. Retro, but tasteful, and neatly tidied. It’s almost more creepy than the dark, grimey office she had imagined. Clearing her throat, she pulls out the chair, and tucks herself behind the desk.

Five checks through the small window to the corridor beyond. He’s tightly wound, waiting for something to go awry. “Let’s hurry this up,” he says.

Allison nods, and pretends her hands aren’t shaking.

The PA system looks old, but she figures it out easily enough, and pulls the microphone close to her. She takes a breath.

Pressing the button feels like pulling a trigger.

“I heard a rumour,” she murmurs lowly, hands squeezed tight around the mic, eyes closed, “that all of you forgot that time travel exists. I heard a rumour that you forgot about The Commission, and went home, and never thought about any of this again.”

The sensation of her rumour taking hold is equal parts thrilling and revolting. This time is worse than ever, because of the sheer amount of people she has just rumoured, and if she had eaten anything, she’s sure she would be throwing up, but instead she just presses her forehead against the cold surface of the desk and tries to stop shuddering.

She has broken her promise.

“I thought you were going to kill them,” Five says irritably. 

Allison says, voice weak, “I’ve hurt enough people, Five. Let them go.”

He sniffs. “Fine. I’m going to blow the building, though. You should wait outside.”

“Fine,” says Allison. When she stands, her knees almost buckle, and the world spins. She has to grip the back of her chair for balance.

Five is suddenly closer than he was. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” says Allison. “It’s been… a long day.” 

He doesn’t say anything as she walks away.

It isn’t difficult to find her way out of the building. She just has to follow the crowd of workers walking out with clouded eyes and blank expression. Truthfully, she must fit right in, because she feels pretty dazed too. Everything has just been happening so fast recently, with no time for processing, for sleep, for _rest._ She is carried on the tide.

Allison finds herself in a car park. It seems a strange thing for a murder organisation to have, but she supposes that even murderers need parking spots. As she reaches the edge of it, she feels something alien wash over her, like walking through a barrier, and she wonders if she's reached the edge of the fixed time zone of the Commission, and is now truly in the 50's. A strange concept.

Absently, she watches as her victims unlock their cars with casual routine, in eerie unison, absolute silence, and it reminds her of worker ants when they carry things together, working together without ever speaking. She wanders through the grid of cars. They wait patiently as she walks by, none of them bumping into each other, despite their blank, distant faces. The power she feels sickens her. Shame rises up, burning hot, and her face flushes, and her eyes burn-

_**BANG!** _

The commission goes up in a fiery inferno, loud enough that even the rumoured workers startle, turning to look-

The shriek of car tires skidding against the asphalt-

Allison turns, not fast enough-

A brief, blurred impression of a car-

Painpainpain-

Nothing.


	4. "yes" I said beginning to feel hot, wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me anyway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings at the end this time. they're a little spoilery for the chapter, but please stay safe and check if you need to<3

Allison is in the gray place.

The sun is shining just as brightly as it always is, and as always, it brings no warmth with it. The grass underneath her crunches as she pushes herself onto her elbows, blinking at the sight. She isn't sure where she is, but it's somewhere pretty, with trees and fluffy clouds and a little country path in the distance.

Somewhere far away, a bike bell rings and-

" _Shit!"_ Allison cries out as she presses on the emergency brake. She's back in her car again. Again.

As she pants for air, she thinks back on the explosion. Was Five still in The Commission's timeline when Allison died? And if so… What happened to him? Was he still there, searching for her, waiting for her to come back? Or did he get caught up in the explosion? 

Trembling, Allison takes hold of the wheel, and starts driving.

She needs a payphone. She needs (sleep, food, some coffee, a hug, Claire, Claire, Claire-) to find out if Five is okay. 

If he isn't okay-

No. There's no point in thinking about that. 

After racing way past the speed limit, Allison pulls up at the gas station haphazardly, leaving her car door flung open, and fumbles for her spare change. The narrow phone booth is familiar now, the same graffiti as always, the same scrawled obscenities and doodles of dicks that no one has bothered to paint over.

The phone rings longer than usual, long enough that her stomach lurches with anxiety, already conjuring up horrible scenarios.

The call connects. "Hello?" Klaus asks breathlessly.

She swallows, clearing her throat. "Klaus. Hi."

"Allison?"

"Yeah, it's me," Allison confirms, twirling the phone cable around her finger. "Um. Is Five there?"

"Five? Yes, yes, he's still in bed, already complaining about it," Klaus says.

Allison sucks in a breath. "He's okay? You've seen him?"

"Yeah, I was just bothering him," says Klaus. "Is something wrong? Other than the usual, I mean."

Laughing, Allison says, "Just the usual."

Klaus is quiet for a moment - not long, but long enough to be uncharacteristic - before saying, "Are you sure? You sound…"

She doesn't want to know how she sounds. "It's okay. Everything- Everything is fine."

Unconvinced, Klaus says, "If you're sure."

Allison closes her eyes, lets her head drop back against the cold glass. How long has it been since she spoke to Klaus on the phone? He seems to move too often for her to keep track, but he used to call her sometimes, after she first landed in Hollywood. She isn't sure when that stopped. "Hey, Klaus?"

"Yeah?"

"You know I love you, right?"

He laughs, the sound awkward and flat. "Now I know something is really wrong."

Undeterred, Allison says, "I mean it. I missed you."

It takes too long for Klaus to respond, and each second carves itself in her heart, the sharp aching knowledge that her brother can't quite believe her, can't take her love at face value. "I, uh. Yeah. I missed you, too."

She smiles faintly. "Take care, Klaus."

"Yeah, yes. I- where are you? Do you-"

"I'm okay," Allison tells him, firmly this time. "I'll see you soon."

She hangs up before he can ask any more questions.

With the knowledge that she hasn't made a mistake too great for time to erase, she can finally breathe properly. Her siblings are safe. Or, they will be.

But now, Allison has something she needs to do.

Three hours later, she's on a plane, eating terrible food and drinking a scotch that doesn't stop her hands from shaking. Allison doesn't get any sleep - the nagging fear that the plane will suddenly crash keeping her awake - but she does close her gritty eyes for a while. It's almost restful.

Her nerves only build as she exits the airport and finds a taxi. She knows the kind of welcome that's coming, but it doesn't deter Allison.

It's a strange feeling, going home. As the taxi pulls up on the drive, she can almost pretend that nothing has changed. It's a nice fantasy. 

Knocking on the door only reminds her that she doesn't have a key anymore.

Patrick opens the door. He's got a smile on his face, but as his eyes lock onto hers, it fades, and in its place is something like fear. Something cold settles in Allison's gut. Her ex husband is _afraid_ of her. Patrick licks his lips, eyes cutting away, before croaking out, "You shouldn't be here."

"I know," Allison says apologetically.

"Why- what are you going here? You heard what the judge said, you aren't allowed visitation until-"

"I know, I know, it's just- I really need to see her," says Allison, voice thick. "I, uh. Some stuff has happened, and I just…"

Patrick looks at her for a moment, and Allison waits for him to slam the door shut, but instead, he says, "You look terrible."

"Oh, thanks," Allison snorts.

"No, I mean-" Patrick shifts, uncomfortable. "I'm not trying to be an asshole, but seriously, you don't look great. When's the last time you slept?"

Allison folds her arms. She hates how vulnerable she always feels around him, even now. "It's been a long few days."

He softens slightly at that, because he's always been a little too empathetic for his own good. "I'm sorry about your dad," he says.

"Dad's the least of it," she admits.

Patrick opens his mouth, but before he can respond, he's interrupted by a head of dark curls barrelling past him.

"Mommy!" Claire cries out as she launches herself at Allison.

She bends down ready, sweeping the girl up into her arms. Her heart does something strange, like it's too big for her chest, and Allison can barely breathe around it, but it doesn't stop her from squeezing her daughter tight. "Claire," she murmurs, her voice crackling.

"Mommy, you're _here!_ I missed you so much, I have so much to tell you, are you going to stay? Daddy, can we show her my gymnastics medal?" Claire rambles, and god, Allison has missed this.

Patrick watches them with eyes shadowed and heavy. Allison can see him warring with himself, and she hates that she's put him in this position, but she can't regret it if it means she gets to hold her baby. "Okay," Patrick says finally, "after dinner, okay?"

"Okay," chirps Claire, already leading them inside.

Allison mouths, _thank you._

Patrick looks away.

The house looks good. A little more messy than usual, but it only serves to give the place a warm, lived-in feel that was absent when Allison was here. There are drawings on the fridge; Claire’s favourite stuffed toy is on the sofa. Had Allison stopped this place becoming a home?

She watches her daughter as she happily chatters about what she’s missed, with no resentment at her absence, just joy at her return. Claire really is nothing like her, and Allison is glad. Whilst Claire eats her dinner - dutifully chewing on the broccoli after a stern look from her father - Patrick fixes up a grilled cheese for Allison, her guilty pleasure food. Something about it makes Allison want to cry. Even after everything, he’s making sure she isn’t hungry, and Allison takes and takes and takes. 

After they’ve all eaten, Claire excitedly shows off her gymnastics medal. It’s a silver second place, and Allison’s father is in her head saying that it isn’t good enough, so she emphasises just how proud she is of Claire. Her daughter beams. Patrick shows her some photos of Claire dressed up in her sparkly leotard and hairspray, and Allison coos at her daughter’s wide grin. It highlights just how much she’s missed, but at the same time, it fills the empty space inside of Allison to finally see how her daughter has been growing since Allison left. 

They all settle in the living room to watch Frozen (some things haven’t changed at all) with a bowl of popcorn between them. 

“Mom, can you braid my hair?” Claire asks with puppy eyes.

Allison smiles. “Of course, baby.”

They shuffle around until Claire is sitting at her feet. It’s strange, not having the kid as a barrier between Allison and Patrick, but it’s nostalgic too. She braids deftly, the texture of her daughter's curls a familiar weight in her hands. This is the stuff she missed most of all, the small, insignificant moments of family that always made her feel like she wasn’t so alone in the world. It’s nice to ignore everything for a while and just _be._

Predictably, bedtime is a battle.

“I don’t wanna,” Claire says with a pout.

Allison sighs, “Claire, sweetheart…” 

“No! You just got here!” 

“Alright, alright,” says Patrick, crouching down the Claire’s level. “How about a deal. We’ll come in and read you one story, and then you go to sleep.”

Claire mulls this over for barely a second. “Okay.”

“Are you sure? Sure enough to-” Patrick brandished out a hand “-pinky promise?”

“Pinky promise?” repeats Clare, expression abruptly serious. It’s _adorable._ She considers this with a deep frown, before nodding to herself, resolute, and wrapping one tiny finger around her father’s. “Promise.”

“Thatta girl,” says Patrick.

In the end, Claire still protests after the story is finished, but she settles down when she is reminded of the pinky promise. Allison’s glad that Patrick is dealing with it, because she’s likely to stay as long as Claire wants. 

The pair both flop onto the sofa. Allison is beyond exhausted, after hours and hours of stress and fear, and Patrick looks at least as tired as her. Single parenting must be hard. She wonders whether he has anyone to help him, these days.

“I’m terrible at braids,” Patrick blurts into the quiet.

Allison blinks at her ex husband. “What?”

Patrick rolls his head to look at her. “Claire keeps asking me to braid her hair, but I suck at it. I’ve tried to learn, I even bought a book on it, but I can never get it right.”

He looks so sad, and it makes Allison hurt for him. She forgets, these days, the reasons she chose him, the reasons she married him. “It’s just practice,” she softly says.

“I just want her to be happy, y’know?” he says.

“Yeah,” Allison says, voice breaking slightly. “Yeah, I know.”

They sit in the quiet for a while. 

Allison breaks the silence with a yawn. “Sorry,” she says, rubbing an itchy eye, “I’m really fucking tired.”

“Me too,” breathes Patrick, not shifting from where he’s sat, not attempting to kick her out.

It’s stupid, she knows, to push her luck, but she can’t stop herself. She reaches out and slips one hand into his. 

Patrick stiffens slightly. “Allison…”

“I know. I know I ruined it,” Allison tells him earnestly, desperately. “But can we- Can we just pretend? Just for tonight.”

His eyes look too bright in the dim light. “Okay,” he whispers.

She doesn’t have any pyjamas here anymore, but Patrick lends her an old shirt of his, one that she always liked to steal. The material is soft and warm as ever. They slip into bed silently, neither looking at each other, nor speaking. The peace is precious. It’s not going to last, of course, but it’s so precious.

The sheets rustle as they reach across the miles of duvet and find each other's hands.

Time passes, but Allison suspects that neither of them have closed their eyes. She’s not sure what she’s waiting for, but she’s waiting for something. 

“Allison,” he says.

She takes a breath. “Yeah?”

It’s so quiet that she can hear him swallow. “Did you make me love you?”

Allison closes her eyes. She’s overly conscious of her heart beating in the dark, loud and fast. “Yes.”

He doesn’t get angry. It’s worse, somehow, like he had expected it. “Okay,” he says. He doesn’t withdraw his hand.

“But- Not until our honeymoon.”

“What?” Patrick says.

“I did rumour you before that, to ask me on a date,” Allison confesses into the night. “But that was the first time I ever made you… made you feel something.”

There’s a pause, and Allison wonders if he’s angry now, but when he does speak, it’s just a quiet, “Allison…”

“You want to know the worst part? I mean, apart from the obvious,” she says, voice wobbling.

“What?” he asks.

Blinking back tears, Allison says, “Nothing changed.”

A sharp intake of breath. Then the drag of sheets as he rolls over, close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating off of him, and she closes the distance, resting her head on his shoulder. She says, “I’m sorry. You know that, right? That I’m sorry?”

“I know,” he murmurs. “Go to sleep, Allison.”

And she does.

Allison wakes up to the smell of smoke.

Drowsy, she shoves herself up onto her elbows, shoving at Patrick, who’s still snoring. “Do you smell that?”

“Wha?” 

The smell is getting stronger, heavy and cloying, and the dawning terror makes her heart race. “Smoke. There’s-” She scrambles out of the bed. “Claire!”

“Oh, shit,” Patrick utters, clumsily standing.

The smoke alarm starts ringing. Too late.

She reaches the bedroom door and grabs the door handle-

“Fuck!” Allison shouts, wrenching her hand back. The skin is red and raw and burning but _Claire,_ where’s Claire?

“Oh my god,” Patrick says, “Are you-”

“Get a sheet or a towel or something,” Allison demands, cradling her hand close to her chest.

He grabs a blanket from the bed, and looks at her. “What do I do?”

She snatches the blanket with her good hand, and wraps it around the doorknob, pulling it open without hesitation. 

Allison should have hesitated.

A billowing cloud of smoke hits her, and behind it are flames, licking up the walls and bubbling the paint. “ _Claire!”_ she screams, but it’s smothered by the crackle of fire.

Patrick is behind her dialling 911, yelling desperately, but Allison knows that they’re not going to be fast enough, and _Claire, Claire, Claire-_

She wraps the blanket around her shoulders and across her mouth and nose, and bracing herself (“Allison, what are you-”), she leaps through the doorway.

The heat is dizzying, burning, choking, and flames lick at her ankles and smoke stings her eyes, and she can’t see, can’t breathe, she doesn’t know which direction she’s facing, where’s Claire, where’s _Claire_ -

The deafening crack of the ceiling beam is the only warning she gets.

It’s fast, but not fast enough that it doesn’t hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings for child endangerment/possible child death, fire, some vague allusions to dub-con


	5. creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning for blood and a suicide (although not a permanent one)
> 
> also a little pseudoscience for anyone confused: five was pulled back into their timeline and reversed along with everyone else, since he was there at the start of the day. the commission remains linear, but five is affected by the loop along with anyone else who was in that timeline when the loop began.
> 
> also also: i ended up rewriting this whole chapter and i don't know if it's actually comprehensible so uh... have fun?

She is in the gray place, and it doesn’t hurt. There are a lot of things that she doesn't know right now. She doesn’t know what this place is, or why she’s here, but she knows one thing:

Allison just killed her daughter.

The grass underneath her tickles her bare arms, but she can’t bring herself to move, can barely make herself breathe, because she just got Claire killed, and she knows she will start the day all over again, but it doesn’t change the fact that it happened. It happened. She’ll always know that it happened.

“That’s enough self pity.”

It’s funny, really, that even now, that voice makes Allison go cold.

“Get up at once,” Reginald commands sharply. A small, spiteful part of her wants to stay down anyway, but she eventually does heave herself upright. 

“Dad,” she says warily.

Reginald regards her coolly. "Does your presence here mean that you've failed in your duty?"

"My duty?"

" _Saving the world,"_ he says imperiously. "Have you failed to do so?"

Shaking her head, Allison says, "Wait, you knew? You knew about the apocalypse?"

Reginald looks vaguely disappointed at this. "Did Number Four not explain?"

“Klaus?”

"He visited," says Reginald.

“Visited? But- Where are we?” Allison asks.

“Silly girl,” Reginald says, “don’t you know?”

And then she’s gasping, gulping, alone in her car on a deserted road at night.

  


The first thing she does is firmly tell herself that she isn't going to cry. Her father rarely had good advice, she thinks, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and self pity really isn't going to get her anywhere. After all of this is done, if it ever is, she will have herself a pity party and drink a bottle of wine and cry to some Alanis Morisette, but for now, she's going to pack those emotions away and deal.

The second thing she does is go to the phone booth. 

She isn't going to make the same mistake again, but she just has to check. She has to know.

"Hello?" Patrick answers groggily.

"Hi," Allison says.

She knows that he won't remember yesterday, and the things they had said in the dark, but it still cuts when he asks, "Why are you calling?"

"I'm sorry, I know it's late," Allison apologises, "I just needed to check- Is Claire okay?"

"What? Yeah, she's asleep. You can't talk to her, I'm not going to wake her up-"

"No, I know," Allison says. "But could you check on her? Please."

There is a suspicious pause. "Is there a reason that she wouldn't be okay?"

Allison sags against the wall of the phone booth. "Not one that will make any sense."

She must sound pretty terrible, because he says, "Okay, give me a second."

After a short pause, he confirms, "She's asleep in her bed."

Although Allison had known she would be, she still feels the knot in her chest release, and sighs in relief. "Okay. Okay, thank you."

He doesn't say that she's welcome. He does, however, ask, "Are you okay? Did something happen?"

"Yeah," Allison says. "Everything's been… it's been a long week."

"Well. Take care of yourself, alright?" Patrick says awkwardly, somewhere between wanting to comfort her and not wanting to talk to her at all.

"I will. Tell Claire I said hi, yeah? Tell her… tell her-"

"I will," he says quietly.

Allison takes a breath. "Bye, Patrick."

  


With the knowledge that Claire is safe settled in her chest, she puts it out of her mind, because there's no room in practicality for sentiment, and this time, she's going to be practical.

This time, she's going back to where the loop started.

She doesn't know whether it will help, whether a solution to her predicament can be found there, but she's left that responsibility for long enough. The world is set to die in two days, and if Allison is honest with herself, she thinks she knows how that's going to happen, and it's not Harold Jenkins who's going to be destroying the planet. He’s not the one with a new, terrifying power.

Harold Jenkins might not be the bomb, but he is the detonator. And bombs aren't all that dangerous without a detonator.

Vanya without Harold is just… Vanya. Her sister. Allison thinks that if she could Vanya out of there, take her home, then she could reason with her. She could explain things properly, this time, and make her understand.

The drive to the cabin is a familiar one. She doesn't need to consult the map, and it leaves her with too much time to think, so she flips the radio to a rock station and turns the volume up until she can't hear her internal monologue over the sound. She doesn't want to think too much. They aren’t going to lead her anywhere good.

This time, she arrives later than her first redo, around the same time as the first day she came here, having made a brief pit stop along the way. It's dark, and the air stirs with pent up energy, the same buzzing, stirring feel that Allison has come to associate with Vanya's powers. Above the sound of the wind, the crooning of a violin sings out. It's so similar to that first time that Allison's heart almost stops. The only difference is her mind, her memories, her preparedness, the weight that she didn’t carry before. She isn’t walking in blind this time. Hands in her pockets, she pushes out a slow breath and drops her shoulders, raising her chin. She’s got this. There’s no reason to be nervous.

Allison doesn’t walk right in this time. She wants her sister to feel comfortable, to feel in control, so she knocks on the door loud enough to be heard over the music, and lets Vanya come to her. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Vanya puts the violin down before she opens the door.

“Allison,” Vanya says with wary surprise.

“Vanya, hi,” Allison says, hoping she sounds casual, despite the frantic beat of her heart. “Can I come in?”

There’s a moment where Allison is certain that she will say no, shut the door in her face, but Vanya says, “Sure,” and opens the door further.

Walking inside, she tries not to look too hard at the spot on the floor where she had bled out. The carpet looks strangely pale without the pool of red.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Allison says quickly.

The look of shock on Vanya’s face hurts a little, but Allison suspects it might be deserved. She doesn’t have a good track record with apologies, even if she’s been getting some practice recently. “What for?”

“For earlier, back at the house,” she explains. “I wasn’t trying to exclude you, but we were talking about something serious, and I didn’t want to mention it in front of Leonard.”

“Leonard isn’t-”

“We were talking about the apocalypse.”

Vanya blinks. “What?”

“That’s what we were talking about. Apparently the world is going to end,” Allison says grimly.

“Oh,” says Vanya in a small voice.

“I didn’t think you’d want us to freak Leonard out,” she adds, trying for jovial, but missing by a mile.

“No, that’s…” Vanya starts, wrapping her arms around herself. “Did Five tell you about that?”

Allison frowns. She’s looped a few times now, but she had never known that Vanya was told about the apocalypse. "Yeah, he did."

Vanya looks down at her feet, chewing on her lip. "And you believe him?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"Well, dad did say that time travel could damage the mind," Vanya says.

"What? Vanya, this is _real_ ," says Allison. "Those people who shot up the house? They were here to stop him from preventing the end of the world."

It seems that this finally gets through to Vanya, because she sits down heavily. "The world's really ending?"

Cautiously, Allison takes a seat next to her. This seems good. They're talking, without any anger or accusations, and Vanya is listening. "Hopefully we're going to stop that from happening. But first, we wanted to make sure you're safe."

"Me?" Vanya says blankly.

Allison nods earnestly. "We - the whole family - received information that made us think you could be in danger."

"Then why is no one else here?" challenges Vanya.

"Luther's having a breakdown, Diego got arrested on the way, Klaus keeps disappearing, and Five has a shrapnel wound," Allison lists off flatly.

"Wha- Is Five okay?"

"He will be," Allison says. "In fact, they're on their way here right now."

"But _why?_ Why am I in danger?" Vanya asks, frustrated.

Allison holds back a wince. "Vanya, it's Leonard. Five thinks he's involved in the end of the world."

And Vanya…

Vanya laughs.

"You can't be serious," she says, as if it's preposterous. 

"I am," says Allison. "Look, I know how it sounds, but he's dangerous, and you're not safe here."

"But Leonard- He can't be-"

Allison reaches out and takes her sister's hand. "I'm sorry, but he isn't who you think he is."

Denial crosses Vanya's face, and she shakes her head stubbornly. "No, you're wrong."

"Vanya, I'm sorry, but he really is dangerous. Please, come home with me and I'll explain everything, but we can't stay here," Allison begs. Every second that they stay, Harold Jenkins gets a little closer, and she doesn't want to see what happens if Vanya has to choose between them.

"I can't just leave him," Vanya says. "I- I _love_ him."

Allison doesn't facepalm, but it's a near thing. She had known that Vanya might protest, that she might insist on Leonards innocence just like before, but she’s come prepared this time. "I'm sorry, but your safety has to come first. I need to get you away from him, " she says unapologetically.

Vanya stands, her small frame held tightly, and the air, which had settled, starts to stir restlessly again. “None of this makes sense.”

“I know, I know everything’s been crazy,” she implores, “but I’m your sister, and I need you to trust me. Please.”

The rush of air pauses, as if the room itself is holding its breath, and Allison holds her breath alongside it, watching as her sister deliberates, torn. Vanya turns to face her. “I-”

The door opens. 

Allison shoots to her feet, eyes narrowing on Harold - _Leonard,_ as Vanya knows him _-_ as he steps in. His remaining eye lands on her, and she can see the tension in him as he appraises the situation, sidling up to Vanya. “I didn’t realise we have a visitor,” he says pleasantly.

Vanya, pale, looks between them. “Um- yeah.”

Tightly, Allison says, “We were just leaving, actually. Family emergency.”

Leonard raises an eyebrow, turning to Vanya in an exaggerated motion. “Is that what you want, Vanya? You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.”

“Um,” says Vanya, and the newfound confidence seems to have dissipated under the scrutiny. “I don’t know. I don’t want to just leave you out here, but-”

“Well, there you have it,” Leonard declares. “If you don’t want to go, you can stay.”

“I’m afraid she really can’t,” Allison says with a false smile. “It’s a time sensitive emergency. Vanya?”

He steps in front of Vanya, eyes alight with smug amusement, and taunts, “I don’t think that’s your choice.”

“Well it sure as hell isn’t yours,” Allison snarls.

“Woah, woah, everyone calm down,” Vanya says, stepping between them, and Allison feels a force pressing against her, not allowing her to step any closer. Vanya looks at Allison. Her expression is caught between apology and resolve. “Allison, I appreciate you checking on me, but I think you should leave.”

It’s funny, really, that Allison feels betrayed again, as if it’s the very first time. “Vanya,” she says plaintively. “I can’t. I can’t let you be near him, it’s too dangerous.”

Vanya’s patience finallys starts wearing thin. “You don’t get to decide that,” she says sharply.

Taking a slow breath, Allison says, “I’m sorry, but I have to.”

“What does that mean?” Vanya asks, eyes dangerous.

“Please don’t make me do this,” begs Allison, because this wasn’t how she had wanted this to go, but she won’t hesitate, either.

The thing is, Allison is a quick learner, and a decisive person. She knows that however long it would take her to rumour Leonard away, it would be too long, and Vanya would react instinctively to silence her as soon as she spoke her signature words. She knows that she doesn’t have the time to be delicate, and she knows she can’t risk leaving her sister with him.

Harold Jenkins might not be the bomb, but he is the detonator. And bombs aren't all that dangerous without a detonator.

Which is why, when Allison pulls the handgun from her pocket, her hands don’t shake.

There is a split second which seems to stretch into eternity, and she watches realisation crash over Vanya’s face, and then Harold’s, quickly morphing to terror. Vanya begins to raise a hand, no doubt to stop her, but a bullet is faster than a rumour, even faster than Vanya. 

She pulls the trigger.

Allison has never liked killing, even if she rarely did it by her own hand, and she didn’t necessarily _want_ to kill Harold, but if there’s anyone that deserves to die, it’s him. She has a responsibility to save the world, and she can’t let Harold drag them down this path. Allison doesn’t know whether it will break the loop, once they’re no longer racing towards destruction, but it’s worth trying, she thinks.

The thought should probably make her feel more guilty than it does.

It might have been harder, killing him, if he hadn’t brought Vanya into this. Her sister. Allison thinks she could do just about anything, if it’s to protect Vanya. She’s not good at being a sister, not good at being family, but one thing her childhood taught was how to protect her siblings, with her knuckles and her body and her voice and sheer force of will, and sometimes that wasn’t enough, but it’s going to be enough this time. It has to be.

So all Allison feels as she watches the man fall to his knees, blood spreading outward in a hot red rush, is a hollow sort of victory in getting the job done. Saving the world. 

Then Vanya makes a choked, agonised noise, and suddenly the world stops being so quiet.

“Vanya,” Allison says, moving towards her sister, who’s knees seem to be giving out on her, only to watch Vanya flinch back. She draws up short. 

“No, no, no, no,” chants Vanya, stumbling over to Harold and pressing her hands over the bullet wound, despite the fact that he was already obviously dead. (Allison had made it quick. She didn’t want him to suffer, after all.) “No, Leonard, no-”

Allison steps forward. “Vanya, he’s gone-”

“You killed him,” Vanya says, and her voice is scarily empty. “You murdered him.”

“I- I had to,” defends Allison. “He was going to cause the end of the world.”

“ _Stop it!_ Stop lying! You killed him! You killed-”

“Allison?”

She had forgotten that her brother’s were coming.

“Hey, guys,” Allison says tiredly.

“Allison,” Luther says with dawning horror, “what have you done?”

Allison blinks. “I stopped him. Like Five said.”

Five purses his lips, eyes skimming over the scene, over Vanya, who is still hunched over the body, still pressing down on a wound which has stopped bleeding. “And you did it in front of our sister _why,_ exactly?”

“She wouldn’t leave,” she explains.

“So you- you _shot him?”_ Klaus asks, face pale as he staggers over to Vanya, pressing a hand to her shoulder and speaking to her in low tones that only she could hear.

“I had to,” says Allison. Honestly, she doesn’t understand the way everyone’s reacting. Shouldn’t they be happy?

Diego shakes his head. “That’s cold,” he says, “even for us.”

“What? But…” says Allison. She looks at the scene around her. Really looks.

_Oh._

Vanya, her sister, is hunched over her dead boyfriend, still desperately pressing down on the wound as if he could still be saved, as if giving up hope is too much to bear. Klaus is trying, unsuccessfully, to pull her away, and his cheeks are streaked with tears. Luther is looking at her like she’s an alien, like he’s never met her before. Diego is watching with his dark eyes, and underneath his casual exterior, she thinks he looks afraid. Five is the only truly calm one. Instead, he just looks sad, expression marred with pity.

Allison is still holding the gun.

“Oh, god,” she says in belated revulsion. She had just-

She had just _murdered a_ man. Any justifications were just that: justification. Allison had killed a man, and not just that, but _plotted_ his murder, taking the time to buy herself the gun that is still in her hand, muzzle warm. 

No wonder her family is looking at her like she’s a monster. She _is_ a monster.

This time, she couldn’t blame it on dad, or the academy, or any of that. This time, it was just her. Allison Hargreeves, mother, actress, murderer. 

“Oh, god,” she says again. “I- I can’t believe I-” Allison presses a hand to her mouth, trying to choke back the words that wouldn’t do anything to change what she had just done. 

“Allison,” says Five, voice hard, “put down the gun.”

She looks at her family. Her family. The people she’s supposed to protect, the people she had thought she was protecting. Vanya still hasn’t moved from the body, but she’s stopped crying, too, just staring numbly, eyes glassy with trauma. 

Allison looks at Luther. Her best friend. She says, voice thick, “I’m sorry.”

She raises the gun to her temple.

Luther doesn’t have a chance to respond before she pulls the trigger.


	6. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: and allison killed him!!  
> y'all: good for her

Allison wakes up to grey. It seems fitting. 

She's unwilling to let anyone sneak up like last time, so she heaves herself upright, and stares at the pleasant, lifeless scenery. Absently, she wonders whether she's in hell. Maybe that first death, where her throat had been slit, had been Allison's true demise, and everything since was a cruel trick, punishment for her numerous sins. If so, it's very effective. She has never felt so repentive in her life - or in her death.

Before, Allison had never thought of herself as malicious, nor callous, and yet killing Harold Jenkins has been so… _easy._

It had been so simple to get her hands on a gun. 

She had never really thought much about it, the whole gun control issue; growing up the way they did made it look pretty trivial. As she paid for the handgun, she found herself thinking about someone like Harold walking into the shop and being served by the guy who had barely glanced at Allison’s ID, taking that gun home, keeping it in his pocket whilst he stalked Vanya… 

And now? Well, she supposes she’s another example of the danger of selling guns so readily. After all, she did purchase the weapon with the intention of killing a man.

She had just thought that doing something so awful would have been _harder_.

The lyrical sound of a bicycle bell pulls Allison from her thoughts. Along the country lane, a girl in a sunhat rides her bike. Her basket is full of flowers, and her eyes full of gloom.

Pulling to a stop by Allison, she says, "You again."

"Um, hi," says Allison. "Have we met?"

The girl seems to disregard the question, instead looking Allison up and down, her dark eyes narrowed and judgemental. "You're breaking the rules. Coming up here is supposed to be a one way trip."

Allison doesn't really understand what's going on, but she's staying to get the feeling that the girl isn't as young as she seems. "Sorry. I don't really understand-"

"Of course not," the girl interrupts. "Even your brother didn't understand, and he's the one who controls these things."

"Do you mean Five?" Allison asks, bemused. "He said that he's not doing this, the time loop thing."

"Not that one. The other one," huffs the girl.

"What?"

The girl looks away, bored. "You should be getting back. Try to make this the last time."

Allison shakes her head, trying to make sense of it all. "Wait, I don't-"

And then she's back in her car.

She pulls off the road, sagging down into the leather of the seat. Since the whole thing with Claire and her rumours, Allison had thought she was familiar with the sick burn of guilt, but what she feels now transcends the usual haunting regrets. She has never claimed to be a good sister, but Christ, she had never thought herself capable of being so casually cruel.

With a heavy heart, Allison makes her way to her usual phone booth.

It's all muscle memory, by this point, grabbing her spare change and absently dialling. How many times has she been here? She thinks she might be losing count.

"Hello?" Klaus answers.

"Hey, Klaus," Allison says, trying to sound a little less dead than she feels. 

Breathily, he asks, "What can I do you for?"

Allison hesitates. She's not really sure how to ask, so she decides to dive right in. "Have you ever died before?"

His laughter comes a little too late, and a touch too loud. "Christ, Allison, what kind of question is that?"

"I'm serious, Klaus."

His breathing is audible, feeling softly, shaking on the exhale. "I- I mean, a little bit?" Klaus says.

"Define _a little bit,"_ says Allison flatly.

"Well," he says, and she can hear him pursing his lips, "it's never… stuck."

It's probably not appropriate to laugh at that, but Allison can't help the little snort that sneaks out. "Yeah, I hear that," she says. "So did you ever, uh, go anywhere?"

"Go anywhere?" Klaus echoes warily.

Allison shuffles her feet. "Did you ever go to the grey place?"

There's a sharp intake of breath. Then, "Allison… did you die? Oh, god, are you _dead_?"

"No, no," Allison rushes to reassure him. "I mean, I did, but it's like you said. It didn't stick."

"Oh, thank God," Klaus says, "I really wasn't ready for ghost phone calls."

She laughs. “No, I’m pretty sure I’m alive now.”

Klaus hums thoughtfully. “I kind of thought it was my powers, but maybe it’s the whole family? Except for Ben, I guess,” he ponders.

“Actually, I kind of got the impression that you might have something to do with it?” suggests Allison.

A beat. “I’m sorry, what are you accusing me of, exactly?”

“Oh, no, I’m not- It’s just something that the, uh, the little girl said to me, about my brother who controls… death, maybe? She wasn’t very specific.”

“That _bitch,”_ breathes Klaus. (Allison hopes that the little girl isn’t listening, wherever she is.) “If I could control death, do you think Ben would be dead? Do you think I would have let Dave-” He cuts off sharply.

"...Dave?" 

"He's- It's not-" Klaus huffs, and she can hear him readjust the phone. "I'm sorry, but I really don't know anything."

Allison sighs. She hadn't really expected Klaus to hold all the answers, but it still stings, having her hope squashed so quickly. "Okay, well… could you come meet me, and we can talk about it?"

"Depends," he says, "where are you?"

“Uhh,” says Allison, looking around herself. “Actually, I’ll come to you. I can be there in about an hour.”

“Oh, another family meeting? A midnight rendezvous?” Klaus asks.

With an unseen shrug, Allison says, “Vanya won’t be there, and I think Diego is still in jail, but sure.”

“Diego’s in jail?”

“Oh, yeah. He was arrested a few hours ago,” she says. Honestly, she had forgotten that not everyone knew about that. It’s become a constant in her reality, each time she starts the day anew, knowing that Diego is gone and Vanya is in danger. Allison is alone. Always.

Klaus lets out a long breath. "I swear this family is cursed."

"I have been feeling pretty cursed recently," says Allison, snorting to herself at the irony. "Hey, I don't suppose you know anything about time loops?"

"Uh. Like, Groundhog Day?

She sighs. "Yeah, I figured as much. Okay, you stay home, and I'll try to be there soon."

"Oh, wait a sec," Klaus says, "can you pick me up some cigarettes on the way?"

"Klaus-"

"Pretty please? I know you smoke, you can't judge me on this one," he says.

Automatically, she denies, "I don't smoke."

"Hey, it's fine, I'm not going to tell anyone. Especially if you pick me up some," Klaus says slyly.

With a defeated sigh, Allison says, "I don't feel good about enabling you."

Klaus whines, "Aw, come on, it's only cigarettes. I'm sober, but if I don't have something to smoke I'm going to go insane."

"You're sober?"

"Yeah," Klaus says, as close as he gets to shy. 

"Shit. Well, congratulations," says Allison.

"... So, does that mean you'll get me cigarettes?"

Allison rolls her eyes. "Fine," she says, "as long as you don't tell Diego, you know he'll blame me."

"My lips are sealed," Klaus promises.

"Yeah, whatever. Don't go anywhere,' she tells him before hanging up.

Despite using this phone booth so many times, Allison has never entered the gas station it's attached to. The place is vaguely grimy, with fluorescent lights glaring and humming, and Allison feels like they're going to give her a migraine.

The kid behind the counter asks, voice dull, "How can I help?"

"Just a pack of Marloboro’s please. Actually, make that two," she says. She had been so stressed through the week that she had burned through her own, and she hasn't had a chance to smoke on any of the loops. Maybe that's the reason her hands are shaking. Probably not - her body seems to restart with the day, so physically it has been only a few hours - but it's a nice thought.

The _ding_ of another customer entering. Something tense creeps up her spine, something like danger, but she tells herself to stop being so paranoid as she pulls her card out to pay.

"Nobody move!"

Or maybe it wasn't paranoia after all.

Despite the warning, Allison turns her head, catching sight of a guy in a ski mask ( _how creative,_ she thinks disparagingly), and a gun in hand.

Allison says, "Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding me."

"I said don't move!" the guy repeats, all macho posturing as he steps towards her. "You, open the cash register."

The worker - pale, shaking, barely old enough to drink - fumbles with the register, taking out a thin wad of notes.

"It's that all of it?"

"Yes," the kid says. "We- most people pay by card, that's everything."

Snarling, the man grabs the cash, throwing it in his bag. The gun whirls back to Allison, and he demands, "What about you?"

"What about me?" she snarks.

His eyes widen, lips thinning. "Hand over your purse."

Allison considers this. She… doesn't _want_ to die, but she doesn't feel too scared of it, either. The thing that worries her more is the innocent civilian who might get hurt, as well as the vague notion that these time loops are something that she can't control, can't rely on. "Fine," she says, tossing him her purse. There's nothing in there that can't be replaced.

The smug look on his face still infuriates her, though.

He eyes her up and down, and the urge to break his nose is becoming more appealing by the second, her hands curling into fists at her side. "What's the necklace?" he says.

"Wha- oh," she says. Allison had half forgotten that she was wearing it. The golden heart lay warm against her skin, a reminder of simpler times, her brother and closest friend. 

"Give it to me," the man commands.

Allison absently touches the necklace. It's not even worth that much, probably, and it's a stupid thing to get killed over, and yet…

She's so tired of feeling afraid.

"No," she says.

Blankly, he says, "What?"

And so, she tells him, with all the vitriol that she used against Diego on their worst days, " _Did I stutter?"_

There is one deadly second of silence.

He moves first.

Everything narrows down to this:

The gun is moving up, fast, but Allison is faster with a high kick at his wrist. The gun goes flying. He doesn't miss a beat, though, using the momentum to swing a fist, and she can't move out of the way in time, so she settles for blocking with her forearm. The punch jolts through her, unpleasant, but manageable, and she takes advantage of the opening, throwing a punch of her own. It glances off his jaw.

He grabs her hair.

Allison swears. Wearing her hair long had always been a disadvantage in training, but she had learned to compensate, but she’s out of practice with true combat, and had forgotten about it. The sting of her scalp is eye watering, but it doesn’t stop her from bringing her knee up. A dirty move, but hey, he had started it.

The man doubles, but he’s a tenacious bastard, and tackles her, grunting, “You _bitch-”_

His weight is on top of her, heavy, suffocating. Huge hands wrap around her throat. He squeezes tight, and _Allison can’t breathe-_

She struggles, panic washing her training away, and she strikes out blindly, ineffectual. Each second wasted is one second closer to a slow, painful death.

And then her brain kicks in.

She folds her knees up to her chest, hiking her thighs over her assailant’s shoulders, and pushes out. His grip is tight, but not stronger than her entire body working against him. His hands slip loose. Before he can blink, Allison twists, rolling on top in one swift, elegant move-

A bang.

Pain blooms through Allison’s gut.

She shakes her head in denial, because she had _disarmed him,_ she can still see the gun, half hidden under the shelves, she isn’t a rookie, she knows she disarmed him-

So why is she bleeding?

“Oh, god.”

Allison takes too long to register that this voice is not her own. She blinks up at the clerk, who is standing by the counter, a shotgun in hand. “Oh, god,” he says again. He looks like he’s about to pass out.

“What-” Alison starts to say, but speaking hurts, it _hurts-_

The man underneath her bucks up, tossing her off, and she whimpers as she hits the floor.

“I d-didn’t mean to,” the clerk is stammering, “I was trying to help, I didn’t- I was just trying to help-”

The thief grabs his bag, seemingly forgetting about his gun, and he scrambles back. There’s blood on him. The door rings cheerfully as he makes his escape.

It _hurts._

“Okay, I’m calling an ambulance, I’m so sorry, I’m calling an ambulance, please don’t die-” a young voice says, but she can’t see them, is it- who-

“Ben? Is that you?” she asks vaguely. Everything is feeling rather far away.

The voice comes again. “What? I don’t- I’m sorry, the ambulance is coming, the ambulance is coming.”

Allison swallows. She doesn’t feel too good. “Ben,” she says again, “I think the bad guys got away.”

She really doesn’t feel too good.

“Do you think-” she sucks in a breath, because the air seems strangely thin. “Do you think dad’ll be mad?”

“No,” a voice says, choked. “No, it’s going to be okay, don’t worry.”

She would sigh, but she can’t find the breath. “Tha’s good,” she slurs. Allison hates when dad gets mad.

Everything is slow and dark. Absently, she hopes she won’t get in trouble for falling asleep on a mission.


	7. i seem to be defying fate, or am i avoiding it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to courtney, thank you for workshopping this bit with me (way back when I first had this idea but didn't know where I was going with it)

When she awakens in the grey place, she isn't alone.

The little girl stands over her, hands on her hips. She looks taller, somehow, than last time. "Are you deaf?" she asks.

Allison blinks. "Uh- no?"

"And you understand English, presumably?"

"Yes," says Allison, a touch defensive. She rises to her feet, uncomfortable being loomed over.

Rolling her eyes, the girl says, "That was rhetorical, obviously. We aren't even speaking English now." 

As much as Allison hates to admit to being confused, she has no idea what that means, because she’s _pretty sure_ that she’s speaking English. “Can you please stop talking in riddles and just tell me what I’m supposed to do?” she asks, exasperated.

“That’s not my job,” the girl says dismissively, and then she clicks her fingers.

In her car, on the same damn road as always, Allison crawls to a stop, and then she laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

This time, she doesn’t go to the phonebooth.

Honestly, Allison doesn’t want to see that place ever again. She may be trapped in a loop, but she still has free will, she doesn't have to keep doing the same thing over and over. Allison doesn't want to repeat herself. Allison wants to do _better._ She takes the drive slowly, humming along to the radio as she goes. That's the kind of person she wants to be: the kind that sings in the car even when no one is listening.

By the time she pulls into the little town, morning light is kissing the tarmac, and Allison pulls her favourite shades on. She hasn't had breakfast in… a while now, and she's kind of missed it, so she rides around until she finds a cute little cafe that's just opening.

The barista blushes when she sees Allison, but doesn't ask for an autograph or call attention to the fact Allison Hargreeves is in her cafe; her favourite kind of fan. Allison shoves a twenty into the tip jar.

The tinny radio hums old pop songs that Allison knows by heart, and despite - y'know, _everything -_ she finds herself relaxing a little as she nibbles on a pastry. Her dietician would freak, but she can't bring herself to care. The rules of Hollywood have never sounded so petty. 

She takes her time, sipping on her coffee, warming her hands around the mug. It’s been so long since she could just sit and breathe. The exhaustion that has been building with each loop can finally settle in her bones, and she lets herself feel it. 

When her coffee is cold, the barista brings a second one.

“Oh, thanks,” Allison says in surprise.

“On the house,” the barista says with a shy smile.

Allison shakes her head earnestly. She’s always hated being given things free just because of her fame. It isn’t like she can’t afford to pay; Allison would rather they gave free coffee to people in need, rather than giving them to her, just because they saw her in some movie. “No, that’s okay, I’ll pay for it.”

“No, I insist,” she replies. The barista licks her lips, eyes glancing around quickly, before adding, “I saw _Sincerely, Me_ at the cinema, like, three times. It- well. It meant a lot.”

“Oh,” says Allison.

The movie in question is probably the part she’s most proud of, despite it being a smaller production, the cast mostly untested young actors. The reaction to it, although less common than the fans of her bigger Hollywood films, is always the most sincere.

If anything, Allison always felt rather undeserving. Playing a queer woman shouldn’t be considered _brave._ Still, it means a lot that it touched people, and that she had done the role justice. That had been her main concern, going in, that she wouldn’t be able to capture something that isn’t a personal experience of hers, and she had almost pulled out at least a dozen times before filming started. The only thing that had stopped her was the memories of Klaus, in their teens, and the tentative talks about boys they had, where he always seemed on the edge of running, but also on the edge of something bigger than himself. 

Later, he had told her, his eyes fierce and brave, that he was pansexual. She had wondered, at the time, how he had even found that term - it certainly wasn't one she had heard before - but she decided it suited him all the same. So, years later, she had been glad to repeat the same phrase in front of the cameras, and hoped that somewhere, some kid might hear her and feel a little less alone. (She had thought about inviting him to the premier, but she hadn't, in the end. Klaus probably hasn’t seen the movie. If he had, he’s never brought it up.)

The barista is watching her anxiously, so Allison makes sure to smile extra bright. "Well, thank you. Between you and me, it was my favourite role."

Eyes crinkling, the barista says, "Well, enjoy your coffee."

"Thanks," she says again.

Before Allison leaves, she signs a napkin with the Sharpie she always keeps handy, under a note saying, ' _Thanks for the coffee,’_ and a little smiley face.

Taking a breath of fresh morning air, she feels- not _optimistic,_ that boat sailed several deaths ago - but a little less defeated. It helped, the reminder that, whilst Allison has made mistakes, and a lot of them, she has done some good things. Her life isn't totally a negative impact. It doesn't erase the hurt she's caused, but maybe it might balance things a little. 

She finds a payphone. This one is a bit less grotty than the one by the gas station, but there are still plenty of lewd doodles to look at. She entertains herself with rating the quality of them as she dials.

The answer is slower than the ones she usually gets when she calls at night, but eventually Luther picks up with a gravelly, "Hello?"

"Luther, hi!" Allison says. It's been a while since she last spoke to her (favourite, if she’s being honest) brother, outside of the time he found her holding the gun, but it's best not to think about that.

"Allison," he says, surprised. "Where are you?"

"I've gone to check on Vanya," she says, "but I need to talk to Klaus. Can you guys come down here? Diego should have the address."

Luther replies, "Uh, I don't think Diego's home."

"He will be there soon," Alison tells him, mentally trying to calculate what time he gets out of jail. 

"Okay," says Luther, always a bit more confident with clear instructions. "We'll be there."

Relieved, Allison says, "Great. I'll see you soon."

"Wait-" he blurts before she has the chance to hang up. "Are you- I mean, are you okay?"

It's funny, really, that he can still read her so well, even now. "I will be," Allison says, and she hopes it isn't a lie.

She has some time to kill before she goes to Vanya - she doesn't want to arrive too early and have to deal with Leonard - so she hunts down a gift shop. It's a tacky little place, but Allison still smiles when she finds what she's looking for. On the shelf, a pitiful looking teddy bear is sat, holding a pink heart proclaiming, _Sorry!_

It won’t undo all of the bitterness between them, she thinks, but it’s a start.

She parks a little way away from the house and walks the rest of the way. Her choice of shoes isn’t ideal, but she wants to make sure Leonard isn’t home before she knocks. There’s enough tension between the sisters without adding an asshole boyfriend to the mix. It turns out to be a good choice, because as she approaches the treeline, she catches sight of him leaving, getting in his car, expression pleasant, his visible eye shadowed. Allison shivers.

The mournful sound of the violin sings out.

Hands wringing the stupid stuffed bear, Allison steps onto the porch, and rings the bell.

The music cuts off with a discordant shriek. Vanya is too light for her footsteps to be audible, and Allison can’t help but startle slightly when the door swings open. “Oh,” says Vanya, easy smile sliding off of her face. 

“Hi,” Allison says. “Um. Surprise?”

Vanya looks at her warily. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to say sorry,” says Allison, brandishing the teddy bear between them. 

“I- thanks?” Vanya says, hesitantly taking the bear, as if it might secretly be a bomb. “I’m sorry too. I mean, about what I said earlier, it was… harsh.” 

“No, it was true,” she tells her. “We did exclude you. I’m sorry, it wasn’t fair, and I want to do better in the future, if you’ll let me.”

Looking vaguely shell shocked, Vanya mumbles, “Yeah. That would be nice. Um.” She shakes her head, face scrunched. “Do you want to come inside?”

Smiling, Allison says, “Yeah, that would be great.”

Vanya stands in the middle of the room, the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands, the way she always wears them when she’s overwhelmed. “I can make coffee?”

“I actually just had some,” Allison says. “I don’t suppose you have any beer?”

“It’s” - Vanya checks the clock - “barely afternoon.”

“It was a long morning,” she says wryly.

Relenting, Vanya puts the bear aside, and digs a couple of bottles out of the fridge, inexpertly taking the tops off, sloshing a little onto the counter. The bottle is cold and a little sticky when she passes Allison hers.

"Cheers," says Allison, clinking their bottles together, before taking a long drink. She's always been more of a whiskey fan, but the flat flavour reminds her of weekends with Patrick.

Vanya takes a seat on the couch, picking at the label of her beer, holding herself small and tight. "Are the others mad at me?"

"No," says Allison, taking a seat by her sister. "More worried, I think."

"Worried? Why?" Vanya asks, brow crinkled, like the concept is truly perplexing.

Allison’s heart speeds up, thumping painfully against her ribcage, because no matter how many times she has this conversation, she can’t seem to get it right. “Five received some intel. It’s… It’s about Leonard.”

“What?” Vanya pulls back. “I told you to stop spying on him!”

Shaking her head, Allison says, “No, I wasn’t, I swear.”

But Vanya is already defensive, hands tight around her beer bottle. “Why can’t you just let me be happy?”

“Because I’m scared!” Allison blurts out, surprising even herself. She draws in a breath, looking away from her sister, who is watching with wide eyes. “I’m scared that I’m going to lose you, just after I got you in my life.”

Vanya looks… lost. “You never wanted me in your life, Allison.”

“I was stupid,” says Allison, “and selfish, and I thought I needed everyone to love me, because I was so scared that nobody loved me, and-... I didn’t realise that the only people I needed was my family. And then it was too late.”

“So- So what?” Vanya asks, voice thick. She stands, putting some space between them. “So, I’m just supposed to forgive you? I was alone! I was alone for _seventeen years.”_

“I know,” she says, eyes hot with unshed tears, “I know, it doesn’t make up for it.”

“No,” says Vanya cuttingly. “No, it doesn’t.”

Allison nods, wiping at her eyes, trying to get control of herself. She needs to be smart, not emotional. “I wish things were different,” she says quietly. It doesn’t change anything, though. She takes a long swig of beer and wishes for something stronger. “Sisters, huh?”

Vanya doesn’t smile. “Things aren’t different, Allison,” she says. “I don’t have a family. The only person - the _only person_ \- who's ever loved me for me is Leonard, and now you're trying to take him away from me too."

"No-" Allison denies, pushing up off the couch and reaching towards her sister, but before she says anything else, the door bursts open.

"Allison," says Luther, relief naked on his face. He steps inside, and the rest of their (living) siblings file in behind him.

Five assesses them with sharp eyes. "Vanya. Are you okay?"

"I'm _fine_ ," she says emphatically.

"Harold Jenkins. Is he here?" he questions, looking ready for battle, despite favouring one side, still clearly in pain.

"Not yet," says Allison.

Vanya frowns at them, setting her drink down. "Who?"

"Are you aware your boyfriend is a murderer?" Five says flatly.

She sucks in a breath.

"Five, that isn't helpful," Allison snaps.

Klaus laughs awkwardly, suggests, “Why don’t we all calm down for a minute-”

“Don’t tell me what’s helpful,” Five interrupts coldly. “Do I have to remind you what’s at stake here?”

“I _know_ what’s at stake,” Allison says, “and I know that turning this into a fight won’t help anything.”

Five steps closer, jaw set stubbornly. “Do not lecture me. You’re not my mother, stop acting like it.”

“I’m not lecturing you, I’m telling you!” she bursts out. “I’ve done this before, and it won’t work!”

Diego frowns from where he’s leaning against the wall, knife in hand, twirling through his fingers. “What do you mean, you’ve done this before?”

Allison sighs. She had been planning on explaining, but she had hoped for a less… _contentious_ atmosphere. With this family, though, it was probably too much to hope for. “I mean I’ve literally done this before. I’m in a time loop.”

Eyes narrowed, Five says, “Prove it.”

“You’re the one who stole Diego’s batman comic, when we were ten.”

“ _What?”_ says Diego.

Five looks at her with something like interest. “You really are looping. But why?”

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to Klaus about,” she says. 

Nervously, Klaus says, “Moi?”

“What does Klaus have to do with this?” Luther seconds, bemused.

She rolls her beer between her palms. “I die at the end of the day, every time. Eventually, the little girl came to talk to me.”

Klaus makes a noise like he’s been punched in the gut. 

“Wait, you- You died?” Vanya asks, voice small.

“Yeah,” Allison says with a shrug.

“And who’s this _little girl?”_ questions Diego, suspicious as always.

Laughingly, Klaus says, “I think she’s God.”

Luther turns his broad shoulders towards him. “Klaus, be serious.”

“I am being serious!” defends Klaus, voice plaintive. 

“I mean,” Allison interjects thoughtfully, “she did seem to be… yeah.”

There is a brief, contemplative silence. As much as their lives are strange, bizarre, inexplicable, this is beyond even that. It’s Five, the most practical of them, that breaks the quiet. “Okay, so what did she say?”

“She wasn’t exactly clear,” Allison hedges, “but she kind of implied that Klaus controls death.”

“I _what?”_

Allison bites her lip. There’s no easy way to say it, so she just tells him straight. “The first time that I died, you were there. I was dying, and you said _no,_ and then I was back at the start of the day again.”

“I can’t do that,” Klaus says blankly. “I can’t do any of that. I’m- I’m useless Number Four, right? I can’t- I can’t _control death-”_ With each word, his voice shakes harder.

“Dad did always say you had potential,” murmurs Luther.

“Dad was full of shit!” bites out Klaus. “I can’t control death! Trust me, if I could, my life would be a lot easier, okay?”

Softly, Allison says, “But you’re sober now, right?”

Vanya makes a noise of realisation. “The drugs… they were blocking your powers.” (The ‘ _like mine’_ goes unspoken.)

“You’re sober?” Diego questions, eyebrows raised high.

“I- yeah,” says Klaus weakly. His eyes are gaining a wild, hunted look. 

Five muses, “You never learned to control your powers. Then you got sober, and saw Allison dying, and you reacted instinctively to stop that from happening, but you didn't know what you were doing. You didn’t know how to stop the death from happening, so you just undid the whole day instead.”

Klaus is shaking. His hands are balled into fists, muscles bunching, a livewire. “This is bullshit,” he says. “I don’t _control_ anything! I never have!”

“Well you better learn, and fast,” Five says dispassionately. “Or else Allison is never going to see tomorrow.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault? For something I don’t even remember?” says Klaus, throwing his hands up in the air.

“Wait,” Luther says. “But… what actually happened the first time around?”

Everyone turns to Allison.

“Um,” she says. “I don’t think that’s relevant.”

“Not relevant?” echoes Five, unimpressed. 

Allison very carefully does not look at Vanya. “This isn’t the time, okay?”

Five rolls his eyes. “This is the _only time we have.”_

“Yeah, I’m with the kid,” says Diego. “What actually happened the first time around?”

The room is silent with anticipation. Allison fidgets, trying to come up with a diversion, because she’s trying to _de-escalate_ the situation, and the explanation she has is the verbal equivalent of a hand grenade. Still, it seems that they won’t be deterred, and well… they have to find out sometime. “It was an accident,” she says, trying to keep it vague without making anyone suspicious. “I came here alone, and things went… badly.”

“So- what, this Harold Jenkins guy killed you?” questions Diego, gripping his knife hard.

“Not exactly,” she says.

“Then what happened?” Luther asks.

Allison stares down at the beer bottle going warm in her hand. How is it that things never go to plan? She smiles ruefully, before tipping the beer to her mouth and draining it. If she’s going to die again, she would rather be a little tipsy. 

“Damn,” Klaus says, sounding faintly impressed. 

She drops the bottle down onto the coffee table, and blurts, “She didn’t mean to.”

Voice deceptively mild, Five asks, “Who didn’t mean to?”

Allison looks at Vanya.

“What?” Vanya says blankly.

“You’re not serious,” scoffs Diego.

“It was an accident,” Allison repeats.

Vanya shakes her head. “I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t-”

Luther runs a hand through his short cropped hair, eyes tight. “How the hell would _Vanya_ kill anyone?” 

A horrified look runs across Vanya’s face. “Oh, God,” she moans, pressing a hand over her mouth, taking an unsteady step back.

“It’s okay,” Allison says quickly, “I know you didn’t mean to.”

“But-” Vanya says, shoulders trembling. “I-”

Five snaps, “Will someone explain what the hell is going on?” 

Ignoring her brother, Allison tries to blot out everything but Vanya, her sister, who looks second away from shattering completely. “Vanya, it’s okay,” she says, taking a step closer.

“No, it isn’t,” gasps Vanya. “I killed you, just like I killed those guys last night, and I don’t know how to _stop-”_

The pressure in the room is building pressing against Allison, and she struggles to draw a full breath against it. The light starts to swing gently.

“What do you mean? You killed someone?” Five demands, seemingly unaware of the deadly charge to the air, building higher and higher.

“I didn’t mean to,” whines Vanya, eyes shining. “I swear, I never meant to-”

“I know,” soothes Allison, stepping closer, having to fight against the air that resists her every move.

A tear finally spills, trailing down Vanya’s pale face, and she holds out one shaking hand. “Don’t, don’t come any closer,” she says. 

Behind Allison, her brothers are trying to shout over the sudden wind, asking desperate questions, but she can’t afford to take her eyes off of Vanya. She had never thought Vanya capable of looking dangerous, and yet looking at her now, her hair rising in wild tendrils, Allison feels a chill down her spine. “Vanya, please, just take a breath,” she begs. “It’s okay, just breathe, please-”

“It’s you,” Five says.

Something in his voice makes Allison turn to look at him. Five is watching Vanya with wide, horrified eyes, face bloodless and nostrils flared. 

Allison says, “Five, what-”

“It’s you,” he repeats. “You caused the apocalypse.”

“Five, _stop talking.”_

He pays Allison no mind. “All this time, it was you. You have powers… You killed- You killed _everyone.”_

“No,” Vanya babbles, “no, please, I don’t-”

Klaus shouts, “Five, stop it! You’re scaring her!”

“Vanya, don’t listen to him,” Allison says, but she can barely hear herself over the howl of wind ripping the cabin apart at the seams, the groan of old wood and the smashing of ornaments against the walls. 

Vanya looks at her with huge eyes. “He’s right. He’s right. Stay back, stay back, I’m not- I’m not _safe-_ ”

“No,” Allison says. She’s close, now, but she can’t reach her sister, the air thicker than concrete, impenetrable.

“ _Stay back,”_ Vanya says breathlessly, and her eyes are wet but- _wrong,_ pale rings forming around her pupils, too bright to look at. 

Allison struggles forward. She’s so close- If she could just reach her, if she could just hold her sister, show her that she’s not afraid-

Her brother’s are calling her back, but she can’t stop, she can’t watch Vanya self-destruct and do nothing-

Vanya cries, “No, stay back, _stay back, don’t-”_

Her fingertips brush Vanya’s tearstained cheek.

A force bowls into her, hard, punching the air from her lungs, and she tumbles-

But it wasn’t from Vanya, it was from the side, unexpected-

And where she had been standing a second earlier, Klaus is standing. He’s red. His clothes, his skin, all rapidly staining red, spreading out from his mouth, which-

The air goes dead.

“No,” Vanya chokes out.

Klaus stumbles, knees folding, and he goes down hard. 

Allison stutters, “Wha- Klaus-”

He makes an awful, wet, thick noise, like a bath draining, like blood in his mouth, in his lungs-

And then he stops making any noise at all. 


	8. i start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear to my heart,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw: dead bodies, discussions of suicidal behaviour, all the fun stuff

Time seems to hold still. Everything around her is slow, right down to Allison's breathing, the space between her heartbeats. It isn't right. Or maybe everything is too fast, and Allison is the one who's too slow, too slow to keep up with everything moving around her. Either way, she isn't really… here. She's not in the moment, not in time with everyone else, and they live around her whilst she sits uselessly on the floor, a couple feet from her brother, who is sprawled in a puddle of his own blood. 

All she can think is, it should have been me.

Allison would have been okay with dying. She's done it plenty before, after all, and she's all but guaranteed a second chance - a third, fourth, seventeenth chance - at life. To Allison, death is just another inconvenience. A painful one, sure, but a temporary pain, one that won't stick.

And Klaus knew that.

So why - why - would Klaus sacrifice himself like that? Why? 

Diego is crouched over him, pumping his chest, even though it's obvious that it won't work. All it does is make Klaus' broken body twitch, and push blood from his mouth in a sluggish, congealing trail. The way his chest bends with each compression speaks of broken ribs.

Someone is wailing. 

Allison touches her mouth, half expecting the sound to be coming from her, but it isn't. It's Vanya. She is buried in Five's shoulder, rocking, making these horrendous noises, and he's holding her, but his eyes are on the body. He looks far away.

"Allison," someone says.

It's Luther, kneeling at her side, one hand extended towards her without making contact. His eyes look scared, and younger than they should.

"He died," Allison says absently.

Luther's face crumples.

"No, don't cry," says Allison, on some vague reflex. Her tongue feels numb and huge in her mouth. "It's going to be okay."

"Okay?" Luther echoes, voice twisted and hurt.

She nods. It has to be, doesn't it? Allison will make it okay. She's made mistakes before, but she fixed it, and she'll fix this one too. Just like with Claire. This too will become a memory for Allison alone, something she will move on from, or pretend to, another nightmare that never came to be. She can fix this.

Allison lunges, and grabs a knife from Diego's harness.

"Allison, stop!" shouts Five, disentangling himself from Vanya, one hand reaching towards her.

"It's okay," Allison says pleasantly, calmly. "I'm going to fix it."

Even Diego has stopped his chest compressions to stare at her. His eyes are huge in his face. "What the hell, Allison? Give me the knife back."

"I can't," she says, gripping the knife tight, knuckles pale. "I have to fix it."

Luther implores, "Allison, please, put the knife down. I can't- I can't lose you, too."

Frustrated, Allison says, "You don't understand. I have to go back, I have to stop this from happening!"

Five takes a step closer. The toe of his shoe is touching the pool of blood which is quickly soaking into the carpet. "If you're right, if Klaus was the one who caused the loop, then it's broken, Allison. You'd just die."

"You can't know that," Allison argues. "I have to try."

"No, no, you don't," says Luther, voice crackling.

Five takes another step, leaning forward like he's preparing to jump.

Allison presses the blade to her own throat. She warns, "Get back.”

“Stop!” Diego hisses. “For fuck’s sake, he’s dead! Don’t you get it? He’s dead! It’s too late!”

“Don’t make me lose another sibling,” Luther adds. “I can’t watch you die.”

Apologetically, Allison says, “You already have.”

She braces herself. It’s not the first time her throat has been slit, and it’s not the first time that she’s taken her own life, but dying doesn’t get any easier, no matter how much practice she has.

The knife flings out of her hand, planting itself into the wall with a thunk!

Vanya pants, one hand extended towards her. “Don’t,” she says. “Please, I can’t- I can’t-”

It’s seeing her sister’s tears that finally breaks Allison out of her daze. “Oh, god,” she says. “Vanya-”

“I killed him,” Vanya bursts out. “I- I killed Klaus.” Her breath is coming in wet gulps, too fast, and her eyes are wild.

“It was an accident,” says Allison, stumbling towards her sister and putting her hands on Vanya’s narrow shoulders. 

It doesn’t matter, though, not to Vanya. She shakes her head manically, and says, “I killed him. I-”

The front door swings open.

The siblings whirl around to where Leonard is standing with a stunned expression, looking between Vanya, and the siblings, and Klaus’ broken body. “What- Vanya, are you okay?” he says as he regains his composure, stepping into the room as if going to Vanya’s side, but Allison is on her feet and striding forward before he gets any closer. She grabs his arm and twists it behind his back, shoving him face first into the wall.

“Allison,” someone says weakly, but she doesn’t care, doesn’t care about anything other than this bastard, this piece of shit, the reason her brother is dead, the reason Allison has died, over and over and over.

“Give me one reason,” Allison hisses, “one reason that I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

He writhes against her grasp, crying out, “Stop! Vanya, she’s hurting me!”

The knife that Vanya threw is still jammed into the wall, and Allison wrenches it out and presses the flat of the blade to his jaw, a barely there touch that has him freezing. “Do you know what it feels like to have your throat slit?” she asks. “To choke on your own blood? To bleed out?”

“Allison, stop.”

She huffs, but doesn’t remove the blade from his skin. “Vanya, you don’t understand. All of this is his fault. He planned this whole thing, he used you, he got Klaus killed-”

“Okay,” Vanya agrees, “maybe- maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s dangerous, like you said, but we can’t just…” She pauses, taking a breath. “I’m so tired of people dying because of me.”

The hollowness in her voice makes Allison falter. "What do we do with him, then?"

Diego says, "If we can't kill him, we can call in an anonymous tip, let the police deal with him."

"But what about- what evidence is there?" Luther questions. "Klaus-... There's no murder weapon."

"There a body," Allison says softly, "in his loft."

Resolved, Five says, "I'm pretty sure that'll break the terms of his parole. We can take him back with us, drop him off at the police station."

Allison asks, “Does anyone have any rope-”

Five leaps through space, appearing in a flash of cyan, a picture frame in one hand, and he brings it down on Harold Jenkins head. Hard.

Letting the dead weight drop, Allison says, “That works, too.”

“What do we do with…?” questions Diego roughly. He hadn’t moved away from Klaus.

Luther tentatively suggests, “We can take him home. Mom will- She can clean him up.”

It’s only then that Allison thinks to say, “He’s died before, you know.”

“In one of your loops?” Five asks. He sounds disinterested, but the way he avoids looking at any of the blood is telling enough. 

“No, before. He mentioned it. I- I never asked,” she confesses. Absently, she realises that she’s shaking, trembling all over with the adrenaline crash. 

Diego ghosts one scarred hand over his brother’s palm. Goodbye. “He’s overdosed before. The paramedics always shock him back, though. He always joked about it, at the hospital, if I got there before he sneaked out. I used to get so m-mad.” His voice hitches and halts, and it takes a moment for Allison to realise that it isn’t a resurgence of his stammer. It’s just plain old crying. He doesn’t even try to hide it, tears running down his cheeks uninhibited. 

“Maybe…” Allison says, wrapping her arms around herself, “maybe he’ll come back.”

“What do you mean?” questions Luther.

She shrugs, the movement stilted. “Maybe it’s part of his power. He’s come back before, right?”

“He’s come back from an overdose after he’s been pumped full of naloxone,” Diego says stiffly. “This is- blunt force trauma, internal bleeding, some shit like that. You don’t just walk that off.”

Vanya makes an awful, pained sound, and pulls at her own hair.

Glaring at Diego, Allison returns to her sister’s side, wrapping her arms around her. “You can’t know that. He stopped me dying, right?”

“He’s not immortal, Allison,” Five says tiredly. “In the last timeline, I found him, his body. He died like everyone else.”

She closes her eyes. How foolish of her, to still have hope, even now.

“We should leave. I’ll take this asshole,” decides Five, nudging Harold with the toe of his shoe. “Allison, are you okay to drive, or are you going to try wrapping your car around the nearest tree?”

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Allison spits. 

Raising one eyebrow, Five says, “Charming. Luther, grab Jenkins. Vanya-” his voice softens, almost imperceptibly, “you should go with Allison. I don’t want this guy around you any more than necessary.”

Diego, determined, says, “I’ve got Klaus.” With careful hands, he scoops Klaus up. The way his head rolls loosely on his neck is obscene, unnatural, and the blood that he choked on is yet to congeal fully, running thickly out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes aren’t quite closed properly, a hint of green peeking out from under his eyelashes. He looks… dead. Allison doesn’t know why she expected otherwise.

Vanya gets into the passenger seat, facing rigidly forward so that she doesn't have to watch Diego slide into the back with Klaus in his arms, cradling him close like something fragile. In the other car, Luther all but throws Harold Jenkins into the back. Five pauses thoughtfully, looking back at the cabin. "Does anyone have a lighter?"

Wordlessly, Allison grabs hers out, and tosses it towards him. He smiles without any mirth, and disappears for a moment. Five's back not a minute later. He returns the lighter, before getting into the car on the drivers side. He looks ridiculous, barely able to see over the steering wheel, but Allison doesn't bother fighting him on it.

As the two cars drive away, the flames begin to lick their way up the curtains, illuminating the hollow windows which watch them go.

“I didn’t mean to,” Vanya says, a vague repetition, as she looks down at her hands.

Allison soothes, “I know.”

“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she says plaintively.

“What happened?” croaks Diego from the back seat. 

Allison warns, “Diego.”

“No, it’s okay,” says Vanya. “I- I don’t really know. There was just all this energy and it kind of… burst out of me.”

There’s quiet for a moment. Then, Allison mutters, “He pushed me out of the way. Why would he do that? I would have been fine. I would have…”

“The worst fucking time to develop a hero complex,” Diego says, laugh breaking and hitching.

“I just- I don’t understand,” she says miserably, hands tight around the steering wheel.

Diego takes a breath. “He lost someone. Recently. He wasn’t- I don’t think he was okay.”

“What are you saying?” Allison demands sharply.

He shrugs woodenly. “I’m not saying he wanted to die, but… I don’t know.”

They contemplate that bitter thought. Guilt sits heavy in Allison’s stomach, and she has to breathe through her nose slowly to settle the nausea. How many times has she lived this day? How long does it take for her to notice when people, when her own siblings, are suffering?

Always, always too late.

The clock glowing on the dash tells her that there’s only an hour left of this long, long day.


	9. quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> final chapter! i'm too tired to proofread but hopefully it is mildly comprehensible 
> 
> tw for panic attack and allusions to suicidal behaviours

The house, somehow, looks more oppressive than ever, and Allison has the strong urge to turn the car around, to do anything but deliver her brother's body to the mouth of this beast. He hates it here. Hated it here. Still, for all that the academy is a house of horrors, it's still their home, no matter how much they wish that it were not the case.

Diego carries Klaus inside, whilst Allison hurries to open the doors ahead of them. The others had split off to go to the police station, so for now, it's just Vanya, Diego, and her. Vanya follows them like a shadow. Her shoulders are up around her ears, and she jumps at every noise, like she's waiting for their father to storm in and berate them.

The infirmary is cold and sterile. Vanya mutters something about finding Mom, whilst Diego gently lays the body down, although he doesn't quite let go, keeping one hand in his grip. 

When Grace enters the room, she freezes up. The steady rhythm of heels on the floor stutters, before forging forward, to her son's side. "What happened?" she asks urgently, one hand pressing against Klaus' neck where his pulse should be.

"Can you bring him back?" Diego asks, voice crackling.

"I-" she falters. "I'm afraid it's too late for that."

It's the obvious answer, but still, Allison looks away to hide the tears in her eyes, finding the clock on the wall. There's still fifteen minutes of the day left. Plenty of time. She offers, "I could still do it. Maybe the loop isn't broken yet. Maybe-"

"No," Diego cuts her off. "You heard what Five said."

With a damp washcloth, Grace begins cleaning the blood from his face. With his face clean, he looks a little less grim, but the grey pallor of his skin is undeniable. He doesn’t look peaceful. Grace closes his eyes, and smooths a hand over his brow, and yet something about the lines of his face is tense, even in death. His shirt is unsalvageable, but she dabs at it anyway. The pair of dog tags around his neck are smeared red, and it takes Grace a while to dig the blood out of the ridges of the words, the star of David engraved in.

Sniffing wetly, Diego straightens the line of the army-style vest Klaus is wearing, only for something to slide out of his pocket onto the floor. Allison swoops down to pick it up. “Airbourne,” she reads the patch, puzzled. “Why…” She looks at her brother, the army jacket and tags, eyebrows drawn low.

Diego clears his throat. “I think he… the person he lost… he was crying over some photo in a VFW bar.”

It strikes Allison that she really didn’t know Klaus as well as she thought. She remembers the start of the week, and ‘ _Klaus is still Klaus’._ Allison had fallen for his theatrical act, and assumed that there was nothing more to him, and now he’s lying dead in front of her, and he’s a stranger.

“Dave Katz,” murmurs Grace. “The name on the dog tags is Dave Katz.”

“I didn’t even realise that he…” Vanya says, before flushing hard. “I mean, not that it matters. I just...“

Allison says, “He never really talks about himself, does he?”

“Did he,” Diego mutters.

“What?” Allison asks.

“Not ‘ _does he’._ It’s _did he._ Past tense.”

The air goes cold and hard, and Allison hears Vanya take a shaky breath.

That’s when Luther ambles in. As soon as he sees Klaus, his breath leaves him like it’s been punched out of him. He swallows, tearing his eyes away, searching out Allison to give her a closed mouth smile that ends up more of a grimace. 

“Where’s Five?” Diego asks.

Luther says, “At a payphone, calling in the tip.”

Diego nods, turning back to Klaus, squeezing his hand.

“He looks…” Luther hesitates. “Small.”

Allison knows that Klaus is tall, as tall as Diego, and yet it’s true, he does look small, lying there on the cot. He looks skinny, fragile as spun sugar. Her little brother.

A flash of blue signals Five’s arrival. “It’s done,” he says grimly.

Grace puts down the washcloth, stained pink, and says, “I’ll go get some clean clothes for him.” Her smile is decidedly plastic.

“Thanks, Mom,” Allison says.

Once Grace is gone, Five turns to them. “We need to talk about what happens next.”

“What?” says Diego, not moving from Klaus’ side.

“We need to talk about this. The apocalypse seems to be averted for now, but we can’t afford to be complacent.” 

“Five, can you act like a human being for a fucking minute?” Diego snarls, whirling on his smallest brother. “Klaus is _dead,_ and all you care about it your precious-”

“I don’t want anyone else to die!” snaps Five. Looking closer, Allison can see cracks in his facade, pain bleeding through the thin layer of unaffectedness that he wears. “I’ve already lost one sibling, and I’m not going to risk anything that might get the rest of you killed. So _sorry._ Sorry for trying to save your lives.” His small chest heaves with anger, and the hard glint to his eyes promises violence, but it seems Diego doesn’t have it in him.

“Fine,” he intones, turning back to the body. “Talk.”

His jaw ticks, and then Five says, “Vanya has powers.” At the mention of her name, she shrinks in on herself. “Presumably, powers strong enough to cause the end of the world. Somehow, they have yet to manifest before, and are completely untrained-”

“You think dad didn’t know?” Luther breaks in, brow crinkled.

Five shrugs. “The man wasn’t actually omniscient.”

“No, that doesn’t make any sense,” insists Luther. “With all the tests he did on us, all the experiments, he must have figured it out.”

Diego stiffly says, “I know you think Dad was some kind of genius, but face it, he didn’t know what the hell he was-”

“Master Luther is correct.”

The siblings startle. In the doorway, Pogo stands, a hunched figure. Allison doesn’t know how he always manages to sneak up on them, even with that cane. 

“Dad knew?” Vanya asks, so, so quietly.

“I’m afraid so,” intones Pogo.

Allison hopes her face doesn’t betray her guilt, but as Pogo’s eyes flit over to her, she can see that same guilt reflected back at her.

“Then why? Why hide it?” Five questions.

Pogo smiles sadly. “As a child, Vanya was extraordinarily powerful. Too powerful, in fact, and uncontrollably so” he says. “It was for her own good.”

“For her own good,” Five parrots bitterly. “And look at that turned out.”

“We always knew there was a chance that this would happen,” says Pogo. “You’ve not been taking your medication, Miss Vanya.”

“All this time,” Vanya utters. “All this time… you knew?”

He nods gravely.

“Why- why would you-” she stammers. Her face crumples, cheeks flushing as her tears threaten to overflow, and she wraps her arms around herself like it’s the only thing holding her together.

“I am deeply sorry,” Pogo says, “but I had no choice. The danger that you posed - that you still pose - is too great.”

Diego, voice hard, asks, “What are you saying, Pogo?”

“I am saying that we now must make a difficult decision,” he says delicately. His long fingers drum along his cane, a nervous tell. “Sir Hargreeves has left a contingency plan in place.”

“Contingency plan?” Allison echoes. She doesn’t like the sound of it. 

“There is a containment room,” Pogo says, “in the basement.”

Vanya makes an anguished noise. “I remember,” she says.

“What, so w-we just- just lock her up?” Diego says hotly, finally letting go of Klaus’ hand.

Allison shakes her head, reaching out to touch Vanya, but she pulls back minutely, and Allison’s arm drops. “No,” she tells her. “We won’t do that.”

“But,” says Vanya, “he’s right.”

Allison blinks. “What?”

“I _am_ dangerous,” Vanya says, voice wobbling. At this moment, she looks about as dangerous as a baby deer. 

“So what?” Diego spits. “We’re all dangerous! For Christ’s sake, Five is a literal hitman! We’ve all killed people!”

“I killed _Klaus,”_ shouts Vanya. “I didn’t just kill someone, I killed _Klaus._ I can’t- you can’t let me kill anyone else.”

“We’ll find another way,” says Allison. She looks to Luther, who is watching the argument silently. “Right?”

Luther swallows. “I-”

“Luther, I swear-” Diego threatens.

“I was going to say you’re right!” 

Diego stops. “Oh.”

He shuffles his feet, unsure. “I’m not saying that dad was wrong, but… I can’t lose another sibling. I won’t.”

Allison, victorious, says, “ _Thank you.”_

“No,” says Vanya. “No, you can’t just decide- what if I do it again? What if I kill someone else?”

With a slow, sick sense of dread, Allison notes the way the air seems to move with an invisible wind. “We’ll find another way,” she insists.

“What if there is no other way?” Vanya counters. 

"There has to be!" says Allison, because the alternative is something she can't face.

Vanya shakes her head. Her face is still tearstained, but her expression has changed from devastated to a numb sort of resignation. "I won't let you risk it. You need to stop me, by any means necessary."

"No. You're not thinking clearly," Diego says. "Five, tell her."

Silence.

"Five?" says Allison, confidence slipping. Five and Vanya have always been close, and despite his callous demeanor, Allison has never doubted that he loves his sister wholeheartedly. And yet.

"If she really is capable of ending the world," Five hedges, avoiding her eyes, "we have to do something."

Vanya nods, only once. She doesn't look relieved, or pleased, or scared. She just looks tired. Drained.

"No," says Allison. "No. I won't let you."

"This isn't your decision," she says, arms folded.

"Okay, so, what? Are you just going to stay locked up for the rest of your life?"

"If that's what it takes," Vanya replies stubbornly. The air shifts threateningly.

On an exhale, Five asks, “Where’s the basement, Pogo?”

Allison takes a step towards him. “Five, don’t you dare.”

“Get out of the way,” says Five, “or I will _make you.”_

She laughs, shrill. “You don’t scare me, kid. We both know I can stop you if I have to.”

Teeth bared, he asks, “Is that a threat?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Allison, stop it,” Vanya barks, and Allison feels the air buffer her back.

Luther attempts to mediate, “This isn’t helpful.”

“You know what isn’t helpful? _Locking up our sister,”_ says Diego.

“For fuck’s sake, will you idiots shut up and listen to reason for once?” Five snipes. “The entire world is set to be destroyed. We can’t risk-”

“I don’t _care!”_ Allison rages, heart thumping hard enough that she can feel it in her fingertips. “I don’t care about the world, I care about my sister-”

Vanya cries out, “Well, I care about my brother, and he’s dead! He- I _killed him._ I can’t lose anyone else, I can’t live with that, you can’t expect me to-” She gasps for breath, the sound thin and shallow. Swallowing, Allison reaches out to take her hand, but Vanya wrenches herself away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t- I’m not _safe,_ I’m not- I killed Klaus, I-” The air begins to hum, almost glowing. “I killed him, _I killed him!”_

“Vanya-” Allison begs, but she doesn’t try to touch her. “Vanya, you need to breathe.”

“I can’t, I can’t- _oh, God,”_ she moans. 

The air is electrified, and Allison thinks, _no, not again,_ because the sensation of cold static against her skin has become a familiar sensation, and one that heralds nothing but pain. 

Five says, “Vanya, stop!”

The walls are shaking, the old structure of the academy groaning in pain, and plaster begins to flake down from the ceiling. The whole place might just come down on them. She doesn’t want to be buried here.

“I’m sorry,” cries Vanya, “I’m sorry, I can’t-”

_“FUCK!”_

Someone screams. Allison thinks it might have been her. 

The trembling of the house cuts off abruptly, and Vanya’s knees give way in shock, dropping her unceremoniously to the floor. She breathes, “... _Klaus?”_

Their brother is sitting up on the infirmary cot. 

“What…” says Five, stunned.

Klaus is bent over, head in his hands, and with his face hidden, it takes a moment for Allison to notice the silent shake of his shoulders. “Klaus,” she says helplessly, “are you…?”

He makes a choking sort of noise, and Allison finally identifies the sound: laughter. Wet, hysterical laughter, but laughter all the same. Klaus sucks in a breath, and raises his head to face his siblings. His eyes are red, and his grin is just the wrong side of unhinged. “Hi,” he says, and bursts into giggles, like this is the funniest joke he’s ever told.

“You’re alive,” Luther states dumbly.

“Yep!” Klaus chirps. “Can you believe it? That bitch just won’t let me stay, no matter how much I-” He stops sharply, closing his eyes, and one hand reaches up to tangle in the chain of his dog tags. 

Diego says, “What the hell, dude? We thought you were dead! Don’t fucking do that!”

“Don’t do what, come back to life?” Klaus asks with mock offense.

“I think he means don’t die in the first place,” drolls Five.

“It was stupid,” Allison says, her voice heavier than she intends. “Really god damn stupid. Why did you- I would have been _fine.”_

Klaus blinks at her dolefully. “I know,” he says. “I just- I was looking for someone.”

Thickly, Diego asks, “Did you find him?”

A bitter shadow passes over his face. “No.” Then, “Hey, how did you know-”

_“Klaus.”_

Allison had, somehow, forgotten about Vanya. (How does she always forget about Vanya?)

Her sister is sitting on the floor, her knees up to her chest, and her face is bone white. She’s watching Klaus like he might not be real.

“Yes, that’s me,” Klaus says glibly. 

“Klaus,” she repeats.

Klaus squints. “Um. Yes?”

“But… I… I killed you,” says Vanya.

“Well, I guess you didn’t do a very good job of it,” laughs Klaus.

And then Vanya bursts into tears.

“Oh,” says Klaus, freezing up. “Wait, um. Don’t cry?”

Seeing her brother’s ineptitude, Allison folds herself onto the floor, close but not touching. “Hey, it’s alright,” she soothes, “it’s okay, Van, he’s fine, see?”

“But I- I-” sobs Vanya, leaning in ever so slightly, and then, as Allison holds out her arms, all at once. 

“I know,” Allison hums, pulling her close, as if her arms are enough to shield her from a world of hurt. “I know, it’s okay now, I’ve got you.”

Damply, Vanya says, “Klaus, I’m so- I’m so sorry, I never meant to-”

“It’s fine,” Klaus says, wide eyed. His gaze flits away, only to return a moment later, and he slides off of the cot to join them on the cold tile floor. “Hey, look, I’m fine, see? No harm, no foul.”

“It was an accident,” she hiccups.

“I know,” Klaus tells her, placing one awkward hand on her shoulder.

At the contact, Vanya shudders, and a lightbulb shatters. 

Someone behind them shuffles their feet.

“Five, don’t even think about it,” Allison says sternly.

Frustrated, he argues, “This is our chance to do something now, _before_ something bad happens.”

“For the last time,” growls Diego, “we’re not _locking our sister away.”_

Klaus blurts, “I’m sorry, we’re not _what?”_

“You kind of missed a lot,” Luther says apologetically.

“Yeah, I’m getting that,” says Klaus. “For the record, I definitely don’t think we should be locking any of our siblings anywhere.”

“But I killed you,” says Vanya, wiping at the tears on her face.

Shrugging, Klaus says, “Happens all the time. Besides, who here hasn’t killed anyone? Seems a little hypocritical, if you ask me.”

She laughs tearfully. 

“Fine,” says Five, “but don’t blame me if everything goes to shit.”

“I think we’ll take our chances, thanks,” Allison says, pressing her cheek to the top of her sister's head. 

A sigh. “Whatever,” Five says. Then, “Glad you’re back, Klaus,” immediately followed by the familiar _thwip_ of him jumping away.

Fondly, Klaus says, “Little shit.”

Vanya snorts. “He means well.”

(Allison smiles at the sound.)

“Hey,” Luther says, sounding almost shy to interrupt the brief peace. 

“What’s up, big guy?” Diego asks, with only a touch of animosity. 

Luther says, “Look at the time.”

Squirming, Allison manages to half turn without letting go of her sister, or disturbing Klaus’ hand on her shoulder, and she peers tiredly at the clock, only for her heart to skip a beat.

The clock face proclaims the time to be past midnight.

Past midnight.

“Holy shit,” she breathes. “It’s tomorrow. It’s finally tomorrow.” 

Allison grins to herself. She’s got a feeling that today’s going to be a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's all folks! thanks for reading, and feel free to let me know what you thought<3


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